Universal Solid State Radiation Detector

摘要

Radiation detectors are routinely used in safeguards, waste assay, health physics and many other fields. While a lot of safeguards applications use spectroscopic detectors to identify, quantify and account for special nuclear materials, there is also a need to just know whether the radiation present in a given situation includes alpha, beta, x-ray, gamma, and/or neutron radiation. In health physics, this information can be obtained with survey meters typically with a separate probe for each type of radiation. There are probes that can measure alpha and beta radiation at the same time. Likewise, there are probes that can measure beta and gamma radiation or x-ray and gamma radiation at the same time. But, there are no probes that can measure all of these types of radiation at the same time. In this paper, we present the results of our investigation into the use of a solid-state detector that has been adapted from solar cell technology to build a single universal radiation detector that can measure all of these types of radiations. The paper summarizes the basic concepts of this new detector type, and the results obtained to date with the first adaptation of it.