English Posts

Introduction With neutrons we enter the “heart” of nuclear physics. As known it is a sub-atomic particles contained in the nucleus, they are characterized by a mass slightly superior to that of the proton and neutral charge. Outside the nucleus, neutrons are unstable and have a half-life of about 15 minutes. …

What is NDVI Index ? (Contribute from Alessio Giusti @flybri) Live green plants absorb solar radiation in the photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) spectral region, which they use as a source of energy in the process of photosynthesis. Leaf cells have also evolved to re-emit solar radiation in the near-infrared spectral …

The link between cosmic rays and mountains has always been tight. Since the beginning of the research it was clear that cosmic rays, coming from deep space, are absorbed by gases in the atmosphere and that they reach the ground modified and weakened. The primary cosmic rays, mainly composed by …

Antimatter can be bought “online”, perhaps even directly on ebay! But do not expect to receive an antimatter can as the one depicted in the photo above. What you get instead is a capsule containing an infinitesimal quantity of the isotope Sodium 22. This radioactive isotope decays by emitting a …

Rutherford scattering is the elastic scattering of charged particles by the Coulomb interaction. It is a physical phenomenon explained by Ernest Rutherford in 1911 that led to the development of the planetary Rutherford model of the atom and eventually the Bohr model. It is now exploited by the materials analytical technique …

With the knowledge of the theory of the interaction of alpha particles with matter it is possible to measure with precision the thickness of a very thin gold foil. In this experiment the principal concern will be the specific ionization and rate of energy loss, dE/dx, of an alpha particle …

With the help of the spectrometer for alpha particles, described in the post DIY Alpha Spectrometer, we looked at some isotopes and radioactive substances. The main difficulty of the alpha spectroscopy is the preparation of the source: to obtain net lines and good resolutions it is necessary that the active …

Alpha Spectrometry is a fascinating technique because it allows you to have accurate information about the radioactive decay of heavy nuclei and about the physics of the interaction of charged particles with matter. But this is a rather difficult technique, even more difficult than gamma spectrometry. The difficulties of this technique lie …

The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted by c, is independent of the relative speed of the observer and the source of the radiation and therefore assumes the role of universal constant of physics, such as the gravitational constant G, the electron charge, its mass etc. According to current …

The shot noise or granular noise is the electronic noise due to the “corpuscular” nature of the charge. The first study on the shot noise was done by W. Schottky in 1918 examining the elementary fluctuations of the current in vacuum tubes (diodes, triode, etc.). This type of noise is …

When designing and building an electronic apparatus, especially when it is necessary to acquire and process weak signals, generally one follows all precautions in order to eliminate or at least reduce the electronic noise as much as possible in order to maximize the signal – noise ratio (S / N). …

We describe, in this post, the use of a MMIC device (Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit) as the front-end electronics for the amplification of the signals generated by a photomultiplier. This type of device has the advantage of offering a very wide bandwidth (up to 2 GHz in our case), low …

” … The muon—the short-lived cousin of the electron—could be the key to understanding relationships between other fundamental particles. And it holds a mystery all its own. In the 1930s, scientists thought they had matter figured out. Matter was atoms; atoms were protons, neutrons and electrons; and that was that. Then they discovered the …

In this post we describe a particular characteristic curve of a vacuum tube that allows to estimate the size of an atom of a noble gas. The Ramsauer – Townsend effect consists in the reduction of the cross section when electrons with around 1 eV energy collide atoms of inert gases …

We continue the series of posts about PSoC describing the application of the coincidence detection circuit  to the case of cosmic rays. These have been treated in numerous articles and so here we simply expose the results we obtained using the PSoC-based coincidence detector. The system has been connected to two SiPM detectors …