A performance study of an electron-tracking Compton camera with a compact system for environmental gamma-ray observation

An electron-tracking Compton camera (ETCC) is a detector that can determine the arrival direction and energy of incident sub-MeV/MeV gamma-ray events on an event-by-event basis. It is a hybrid detector consisting of a gaseous time projection chamber (TPC), that is the Compton-scattering target and the tracker of recoil electrons, and a position-sensitive scintillation camera that absorbs of the scattered gamma rays, to measure gamma rays in the environment from contaminated soil. To measure of environmental gamma rays from soil contaminated with radioactive cesium (Cs), we developed a portable battery-powered ETCC system with a compact readout circuit and data-acquisition system for the SMILE-II experiment. We checked the gamma-ray imaging ability and ETCC performance in the laboratory by using several gamma-ray point sources. The performance test indicates that the field of view (FoV) of the detector is about 1$\;$sr and that the detection efficiency and angular resolution for 662$\;$keV gamma rays from the center of the FoV is $(9.31 \pm 0.95) \times 10^{^-5}$ and $5.9^{\circ} \pm 0.6^{\circ}$, respectively. Furthermore, the ETCC can detect 0.15$\;\mu\rm{Sv/h}$ from a $^{137}$Cs gamma-ray source with a significance of 5$\sigma$ in 13 min in the laboratory. In this paper, we report the specifications of the ETCC and the results of the performance tests. Furthermore, we discuss its potential use for environmental gamma-ray measurements.