Gas scintillator for conversion electron detection

The authors study a gas scintillation detector for low-energy electron detection suitable for studies of surface layers and thin films using Moessbauer's conversion electron spectroscopy, and provide the results of the study of the detector gas mixture light output dependence on the detector admixture composition, concentration, and mixture pressure. By detecting the inner conversion electrons produced during the decay of the excited nuclei /sup 57/Fe and /sup 119/Sn, it is possible to obtain information about surface layers with maximum thickness of up to 150 nm and 500 nm. The authors studied gas scintillators made of a binary mixture based on inert gases because they have a short fluorescence time that allows one to work with high-activity radioactive sources.