Question

Explain how Bremsstrahlung Radiation and it's characteristic x-ray spikes contribute to how an x-ray machine creates and image.

Answer 1

An electron beam ionizes the atoms of our specimen by ejecting inner or core shell electrons.This probability is governed by ionization crosssection. Then a cascade of electron transitions occur with each transition filling the hole with an electron and ultimately last electron falls in to a core shell from the conduction band.Depending upon fluorescent yield each transition results either into a characteristics xray or auger electron.We get K,L,M...peaks.

The intensity of characteristic peaks for different binding energies and elements is different .From here , we can have elemental identification.

Background in the xray spectrum is bremsstrahlung radiation arising as beam electron are slowed by electrostatic interaction with nuclei.Their distribution can be calculated by Kramer's law.

How detector works?

Our detector has a pass window so that at a particular time,particular energy is allowed to pass and the corresponding counts are noted ,in this way the complete spectra is obtained.