Efficiency calibration measurement and GEANT simulation of the DRAGON BGO gamma ray array at TRIUMF.

A gamma ray array to detect the characteristic gammas emitted from astrophysically significant, radiative proton and alpha capture reactions, was built as part of the Detector of Recoils And Gammas Of Nuclear reactions (DRAGON) spectrometer at ISAC/TRIUMF. The DRAGON array consists of a collection of 30 hexagonal BGO detectors measuring 7.62 cm long by 5.58 cm across the face. A simulation was built with the particle-tracking program GEANT v3.21. The efficiency of the array was measured using calibrated sources of various gamma energies and compared to simulated results. For the cases where the activity of the source was not well known the sources were calibrated using a standard NaI detector of known efficiency. The agreement between simulation and measured differences is more than adequate for proposed DRAGON experiments. The analysis and results of the comparison between measured and simulated efficiency will be discussed in this thesis.