Gadolinium is a chemical element with the symbol Gd and atomic number 64. Gadolinium is a silvery-white metal when oxidation is removed. It is only slightly malleable and is a ductile rare-earth element. Gadolinium reacts with atmospheric oxygen or moisture slowly to form a black coating. Gadolinium below its Curie point of 20 °C (68 °F) is ferromagnetic, with an attraction to a magnetic field higher than that of nickel. Above this temperature it is the most paramagnetic element. It is found in nature only in an oxidized form. When separated, it usually has impurities of the other rare-earths because of their similar chemical properties.
A wire chamber or multi-wire proportional chamber is a type of proportional counter that detects charged particles and photons and can give positional information on their trajectory, by tracking the trails of gaseous ionization.
The Chicago Air Shower Array (CASA) was a significant ultra high high-energy astrophysics experiment operating in the 1990s. It consisted of a very large array of scintillation detectors located at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, USA, approximately 80 kilometers southwest of Salt Lake City. The full CASA detector, consisting of 1089 detectors began operating in 1992 in conjunction with a second instrument, the Michigan Muon Array (MIA), under the name CASA-MIA. MIA was made of 2500 square meters of buried muon detectors. At the time of its operation, CASA-MIA was the most sensitive experiment built to date in the study of gamma ray and cosmic ray interactions at energies above 100 TeV (1014 electronvolts). Research topics on data from this experiment covered a wide variety of physics issues, including the search for gamma rays from Galactic sources (especially the Crab Nebula and the X-ray binaries Cygnus X-3 and Hercules X-1) and extragalactic sources (active Galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts), the study of diffuse gamma-ray emission (an isotropic component or from the Galactic plane), and measurements of the cosmic ray composition in the region from 100 to 100,000 TeV. For the topic of composition, CASA-MIA worked in conjunction with several other experiments at the same site: the Broad Laterial Non-imaging Cherenkov Array (BLANCA), the Dual Imaging Cherenkov Experiment (DICE) and the Fly's Eye HiRes prototype experiment. CASA-MIA operated continuously between 1992 and 1999. In summer 1999, it was decommissioned.
The Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) was a scintillation counter at Los Alamos National Laboratory that measured the number of neutrinos being produced by an accelerator neutrino source. The LSND project was created to look for evidence of neutrino oscillation, and its results conflict with the standard model expectation of only three neutrino flavors, when considered in the context of other solar and atmospheric neutrino oscillation experiments. Cosmological data bound the mass of the sterile neutrino to ms < 0.26eV (0.44eV) at 95% (99.9%) confidence limit, excluding at high significance the sterile neutrino hypothesis as an explanation of the LSND anomaly. The controversial LSND result was tested by the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab which has found similar evidence for oscillations. The hint is currently undergoing further tests at MicroBooNE at Fermilab.
Neutron detection is the effective detection of neutrons entering a well-positioned detector. There are two key aspects to effective neutron detection: hardware and software. Detection hardware refers to the kind of neutron detector used and to the electronics used in the detection setup. Further, the hardware setup also defines key experimental parameters, such as source-detector distance, solid angle and detector shielding. Detection software consists of analysis tools that perform tasks such as graphical analysis to measure the number and energies of neutrons striking the detector.
A wavelength shifter is a photofluorescent material that absorbs higher frequency photons and emits lower frequency photons. The material absorbs one photon, and emits one or multiple lower-energy photons. The relaxation time of the excited molecule is usually in the order of nanoseconds.
Cadmium tungstate (CdWO4 or CWO), the cadmium salt of tungstic acid, is a dense, chemically inert solid which is used as a scintillation crystal to detect gamma rays. It has density of 7.9 g/cm3 and melting point of 1325 °C. It is toxic if inhaled or swallowed. Its crystals are transparent, colorless, with slight yellow tint. It is odorless. Its CAS number is 7790-85-4. It is not hygroscopic.
The large-area neutron detector, also known as LAND, is the name of a detector of neutrons installed at GSI in Arheilgen, close to the city of Darmstadt, Germany.
In particle detectors a detection of internally reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC) detector measures the velocity of charged particles and is used for particle identification. It is a design of a ring imaging Cherenkov detector where Cherenkov light that is contained by total internal reflection inside the solid radiator has its angular information preserved until it reaches the light sensors at the detector perimeter.
ALEPH was a particle detector at the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP). It was designed to explore the physics predicted by the Standard Model and to search for physics beyond it.
Cerium(III) bromide is an inorganic compound with the formula CeBr3. This white hygroscopic solid is of interest as a component of scintillation counters.
The NA49 experiment was a particle physics experiment that investigated the properties of quark–gluon plasma. It took place in the North Area of the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN from 1991-2002. It used a large-acceptance hadron detector to investigate reactions induced by the collision of various heavy ions on targets made of a variety of elements.
Neutron scattering is a spectroscopic method of measuring the atomic and magnetic motions of atoms. Inelastic neutron scattering observes the change in the energy of the neutron as it scatters from a sample and can be used to probe a wide variety of different physical phenomena such as the motions of atoms, the rotational modes of molecules, sound modes and molecular vibrations, recoil in quantum fluids, magnetic and quantum excitations or even electronic transitions. Since its discovery, neutron spectroscopy has also become useful in medicine as it has been applied to radiation protection and radiation therapy. Although neutron spectroscopy is capable of operating on many orders of magnitude of electron volts, current and recent research has focused on expanding neutron scattering to higher energy levels.
Neutron imaging is the process of making an image with neutrons. The resulting image is based on the neutron attenuation properties of the imaged object. The resulting images have much in common with industrial X-ray images, but since the image is based on neutron attenuating properties instead of X-ray attenuation properties, some things easily visible with neutron imaging may be very challenging or impossible to see with X-ray imaging techniques.
Kim Sun-kee is a South Korean physicist. He is professor in Seoul National University and director of the Korea Invisible Mass Search. He was the first director of the Rare Isotope Science Project within the Institute for Basic Science and is a member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology.
The WA70 experiment was a collaboration between the Universities of Geneva, Glasgow, Liverpool, Milan and Neuchatel using the facilities of the OMEGA spectrometer at CERN.
Emilio Gatti was an Italian engineer. He was a professor of nuclear electronics at the Politecnico of Milan. With Pavel Rehak he invented the silicon drift detector in 1983; he later patented it.
The AMY detector was used by particle physicists at the TRISTAN electron-positron collider at KEK in Japan between 1984 and 1995 to search for new particles and perform precision studies of the strong and electroweak forces.
Steven Michael Errede is an American experimental physicist, known for his leadership in the collaboration that experimentally confirmed the existence of the top quark.
David William Hertzog is an American particle physicist, known for his research in precision muon physics.
