English Posts

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 …

The arrival and detection of cosmic rays in a detector is a random process and as such follows a distribution law characteristic of random events. Particularly when the expected number of events in a given time interval is small, then this number should follow Poisson’s statistical distribution. Poisson Distribution Poisson …

Finally at PhysicsOpenLab the Helium–Neon Laser has arrived ! A helium–neon laser or HeNe laser, is a type of gas laser whose gain medium consists of a mixture of 85% helium and 15% neon inside of a small bore capillary tube, usually excited by a DC electrical discharge. The best-known and most widely used HeNe laser operates at …

At PhysicsOpenLab we use many scintillation crystals, mainly coupled with PMTs or SiPMS, to detect particles or radiation. In this post we want to describe the scintillation crystals we normally use in our detectors. A scintillator is a material that exhibits scintillation (the property of luminescence), when excited by ionizing radiation. Luminescent materials, when struck by …

Introduction Bremsstrahlung (from bremsen “to brake” and Strahlung “radiation”; i.e., “braking radiation” or “deceleration radiation”) is electromagnetic radiation produced by the deceleration of a charged particle when deflected by another charged particle, typically an electron by an atomic nucleus (as depicted in the image above). The moving particle loses kinetic energy, which is converted into a photon, thus satisfying the law of conservation of energy. …

The proportional counter is a type of gaseous ionization detector device used to measure particles of ionizing radiation. The key feature is its ability to measure the energy of incident radiation, by producing a detector output that is proportional to the radiation energy; hence the detector’s name. It is widely used where energy levels of incident radiation must be known, such …

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster  was an energy accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima, initiated primarily by the tsunami following the Tōhoku earthquake on 11 March 2011. Immediately after the earthquake, the active reactors automatically shut down their sustained fission reactions. However, the tsunami disabled the emergency generators that would have provided power to control and operate …

The image above, taken from the Amptek site, shows some gamma spectra: uranium, thorium, background, …. Gamma spectrometry is a powerful technique for the analysis and identification of isotopes. With some caution you can also do quantitative analysis and measurements of activity. Even in this blog we have already tried …

The cosmic ray detection can also be done with a normal gamma spectrometer with the classic NaI (Tl) scintillator. The above picture shows a simulation made by a Montecarlo method in which we see how the calculations predict a peak at energies greater than 10 MeV, due to the interaction …

Isotope Potassium 40K As we know, bananas are rich in potassium! What maybe not everyone knows is that potassium in nature is present with three isotopes: 39K (93,3%), 40K (0,0117%) and 41K (6,7%), 40K potassium is unstable and decades in beta mode. This means that potassium present in nature, even that contained in bananas …