A study of photon interaction parameters in some commonly used solvents.

Various parameters of dosimetric interest such as mass attenuation coefficients, effective atomic numbers and electron densities of some commonly used solvents such as acetonitrile (C(4)H(3)N), butanol (C(4)H(9)OH), chlorobenzene (C(6)H(5)Cl), diethylether (C(4)H(10)O), ethanol (C(2)H(5)OH), methanol (CH(3)OH), propanol (C(3)H(7)OH) and water (H(2)O) were computed in the wide energy range of 10 keV-100 GeV. A comparative study of two different methods used to compute effective atomic numbers has been done. It is observed that in the intermediate energy region (0.1-5 MeV), the mass attenuation coefficient values becomes almost the same for all the solvents, and the effective atomic number and electron density show almost constant values, whereas significant variation is observed in both lower (10-100 keV) and higher (5 MeV-100 GeV) energy regions for all the solvents, which may be due to the dominance of different partial interaction processes in different energy regions.