English Posts

Two “general purpose” photodiodes, two LEDs, some front-end electronics for photodiode reading, and a Theremino master are the tools to create a pair of photogates that can be used for many educational demonstrations in the field of the kinematics. There are so many solutions available on the market (hardware + …

Theory We propose an experiment presented in the CAEN educational catalog. The purpose of the experiment is the determination of the ratio of the effective cross-sections due to Compton and Photoelectric effects as a function of photons energy. In the energy range up to 2 MeV, gamma rays interact with …

From EPIC Crystal Co. we received two scintillator crystals BGO (Bismuth Germanate – Bi4Ge3O12) with cylindrical shape with 6 mm diameter and length 10 mm. With these crystals we would like to try to build a SiPM based radiation detector for beta and  gamma radiation. The BGO scintillato has been described in …

From Wikipedia : In electronics, a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) is a current-to-voltage converter, most often implemented using an operational amplifier. The TIA can be used to amplify the current output of Geiger–Müller tubes, photomultiplier tubes, photo detectors and other types of sensors to a usable voltage. Current-to-voltage converters are used with sensors that have a current response that is more …

Charge Sensitive Preamplifier is an electronic device that can integrate a current signal and generate a voltage signal with an amplitude proportional to the incoming input charge. The signal produced by many detectors is of very low amplitude and therefore needs adequate amplification. If the output signal can be assimilated …

β-particle is a charged particle that interacts with matter in several ways depending on its initial energy : mainly ionization process and Bremsstrahlung process. When β-radiation crosses a matter thickness, it releases completely or part of its energy due to collisions with atoms; this phenomenon depends on the initial β-energy …

The energy of alpha particles varies, with higher energy alpha particles being emitted from larger nuclei, but most alpha particles have energies of between 3 and 7 MeV, corresponding to extremely long and extremely short half-lives of alpha-emitting nuclides, respectively. This energy is a substantial amount of energy for a single …

In the Atomic Spectroscopy post, we have learned (and experimented) that the emission spectrum of a chemical element is made up of discrete lines corresponding to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the electrons of its atoms when they “drop” from a higher energy state to one of less energy. For each transition …

With the new Laser He-Ne (described in the Laser He-Ne post), you can easily test the physical properties of the diffraction grating. We propose, in particular, to measure the pitch of the grating through the measurement of the diffraction produced on the He-Ne laser beam. The Diffraction Grating When a …

Cosmic rays are energetic particles coming from outer space. The Earth and any other spatial body, as well as satellites and astronauts in orbit, are exposed to cosmic rays. The cosmic rays nature is very diverse (the kinetic energy of the particles of cosmic rays is distributed over fourteen orders of magnitude), as …