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Abstract. In Compton scattering experiments employing thick targets one observes that the numbers of multiply backscattered photons increases with increase in target thickness and then saturate at a particular target thickness called the saturation thickness. The energy of each of gamma ray photons continues to decrease as the number of scatterings, the photon undergoes, increases in the sample having finite dimensions. The present experiment is an independent study of energy and intensity distributions of 279-, 320-, 511-, 662 keV, and 1.12 MeV gamma rays multiply backscattered from targets of different atomic numbers and alloys of various thicknesses, and are carried out in a backscattering geometry. The backscattered photons are detected by a NaI(Tl) scintillation detector. The detector response unscrambling, converting the observed pulse-height distribution to a true photon energy spectrum, is obtained with the help of a 12x12 inverse response matrix. The present experimental results confirm that for thick targets, there is significant contribution of multiply backscattered radiations emerging from the targets, having energy equal to that of singly scattered Compton process. The measured saturation thickness (in units of mean free path) for multiply backscattering of gamma photons is found to be decreasing with increase in energy of incident gamma photons.

The gamma ray photons continue to soften in energy as the number of scatterings increases in thick target, and results in the generation of singly and multiply scattered events. The number of these multiply scattered events increases with an increase in target thickness and saturates beyond a particular target thickness known as saturation depth. The present experiment is undertaken to study the saturation depth for 279 and 320 keV incident gamma ray photons multiply backscattered from copper targets of varying thickness. The backscattered photons are detected by a Nal(Tl) gamma detector whose pulse-height distribution is converted into a photon spectrum with the help of an inverse matrix approach. To extract the contribution of multiply backscattered photons only, the spectrum of singly scattered photon is reconstructed analytically. We observe that the numbers of multiply scattered events increases with an increase in target thickness and then saturate. The saturation depth is found to be decreasing with increase in incident gamma energy.