Sunday, February 5, 2012

Weekend Follies: Boosting Detector Performance

I've been playing with using different geometries and materials to boost the perforamance of our detector.  If you encase our detector in Stainless Steel (SS-316) you get around a 0.3% increase in in the absolute detection efficiency, compared to air.  After some hunting I discovered this is because of the (n,2n) reaction in nickel.  If you encase the detector in highly enriched uranium you then get a 35% increase.  However, this amount of encasing requires over 100 kilograms of HEU; for comparison Little Boy used 64 kg U.

In other news UCF had a very strong performance at Warm-Up.    I hope they can do a repeat at Easterns; hopefully the South East can get more than one bid. 

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