The assay of soil carbon with naturally occurring cosmic ray neutrons.

Carbon sequestration Gamma ray Inelastic neutron scattering Soil analysis

Journal

Journal of environmental radioactivity
ISSN: 1879-1700
Titre abrégé: J Environ Radioact
Pays: England
ID NLM: 8508119

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
Aug 2023
Historique:
received: 09 10 2022
revised: 04 05 2023
accepted: 05 05 2023
medline: 15 6 2023
pubmed: 9 5 2023
entrez: 8 5 2023
Statut: ppublish

Résumé

The detection of gamma rays induced in soil by naturally occurring cosmic ray neutrons is explored with the Geant4 Simulation Toolkit to monitor carbon sequestration in soil. The simulated soil is a uniform mixture of minerals, air, water, and soil organic carbon. As the soil organic carbon increases from 0% to 15% by volume, the mineral matter decreases, and gamma ray counts from mineral-related isotopes decrease. Characteristic gamma ray energies from a variety of elements are collected near the surface with a germanium detector. Of these, the 2.224 MeV gamma ray from hydrogen is sensitive to changes in soil organic carbon as low as 0.12% after counting for the equivalent of 3.45 days. Counting longer is recommended to reduce the sensitivity of the primary 4.438 MeV gamma ray from carbon below its current value of 2.81% in the simulation.

Identifiants

pubmed: 37156092
pii: S0265-931X(23)00095-4
doi: 10.1016/j.jenvrad.2023.107202
pii:
doi:

Substances chimiques

Carbon 7440-44-0
Soil 0

Types de publication

Journal Article

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

IM

Pagination

107202

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Auteurs

Robert McTaggart (R)

Department of Physics, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD, 57007, USA. Electronic address: robert.mctaggart@sdstate.edu.

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Classifications MeSH