The polymer detectors we are intrested in are based off of the Li-6 neutron capture where a neutron comes in, interacts with the Li-6 and decays into a tritum and an alpha particle.
We were tossing around ideas, and Neel asked why nobody made a LiF crystal detector. Grow a LiF crystal and place it between two parallel plates - like a capacitor. This seems like a great idea, so I expanded it a bit more.
Most of capacitance is due to geometry considerations, with the material property being the dielectric constant. Place the capacitor made with LiF as the dielectric in series with a resistor, measure the voltage across the resistor.
A neutron event will produce an alpha, with has a +2e charge. This would be drawn to the negative plate, and would decrease the capacitance (capacitance is linear with the dielectric constant). Current would flow across the resistor, which would show as a voltage spike across the resistor. BOOM! Neutron detected! Somebody get this man a patent.
I really want to test this though, gotta see if I can get Maryia can grow me one.
Mind blowing: Analog to Digital Converters are essentially doing spectral sampling with a dirac function.
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