Implications of quenching in efficiency, spectrum shape and alpha/beta separation.

Liquid scintillation spectrometry (LSS) is a meaningful technique for the determination of alpha and beta emitters. However, this technique is highly affected by quenching phenomena, which reduce the counting efficiency, shift the spectra to low energies and cause misclassification problems. In this paper, a selection of chemical and colour quench agents was evaluated to study the influence of alpha and beta energy and the quenching effect on the detection efficiency, the shape of the spectra and the α/ß misclassification.