Experimental Characterization and Statistical Analysis of Two Geiger-Müller Detectors After Several Years of Use

In general, radiation detectors are supplied at the time of acquisition with a user manual describing their technical characteristics and nominal operating conditions. However, these characteristics may evolve over time and gradually deviate from the original specifications after several years of use due to intensive operation, electronic component wear, gas aging, and cumulative irradiation effects.In this context, the present work aims to reidentify and analyze the evolution of the characteristics of two Geiger-Müller detectors used at the Nuclear Physics Laboratory of the Faculty of Sciences of Rabat, Morocco, after approximately 10 years of operation. A complete experimental recharacterization of the detectors was carried out in order to evaluate their current operational state and to compare their measured performances with those determined at the time of their first acquisition in 2016.In addition, an in-depth analysis of the archived experimental data collected between 2018 and 2025 was performed to investigate the temporal evolution of the main detector parameters. The exploitation of these historical data made it possible to propose a model for estimating the future evolution of detector performance and predicting their behavior over the period 2026 to 2033. Furthermore, this paper discusses the main techniques that could be implemented in laboratories to restore or improve the performance of aging detectors while also examining the practical and physical limitations associated with these approaches.Finally, this work also proposes a new experimental approach to investigate the detection efficiency as a function of energy in the case of Geiger-Müller detectors used for beta particle detection. Unlike the conventional method, which generally provides a global efficiency without energy discrimination, the proposed approach relies on the use of attenuation layers and on simulations of beta particle attenuation in order to explore the energy dependence of the detection efficiency.