Fig. 4. Plots of power spectral density measurements made with a seismometer at the growth ampoule position in the two furnaces, with and without the Negative-Stiffness vibration isolation platform.
“What we are trying to do at SMART Lab is make it more feasible, more economical for these detectors to be put in place at every critical check point, at every airport and shipping port,” Harrison says. “Tis will increase the possibility of detecting and intercepting shipments of special nuclear material, should they occur.”
Te SMART Laboratory serves as a centre for undergraduate and graduate student education, as well as a facility, to accommodate funded research projects from various government and industrial sponsors. Since the opening of the Laboratory in 1998, eleven patents have been awarded to SMART Laboratory researchers for various detector designs, with several more pending.
Te laboratory’s equipment includes an assortment of semiconductor processing equipment, including a linear-drive diamond cutting wheel, diamond wire saw, precision slurry saw, wafer dicing saw, precision lapping and polishing machines, a custom chemo-mechanical polishing system, a custom six-pocket e-beam evaporator, a 4-pocket evaporator, two dual filament evaporators, an ion mill, vacuum annealing chamber, fission chamber plating station, mask aligners, microscopes, ovens, grinders and furnaces for annealing, sintering, diffusions and oxidations.
Te Lab has numerous crystal growth furnaces used to grow
CdZnTe, LaBr3, and HgI2 crystals for radiation detector development, which include 40 horizontal and 10 vertical HgI2 vapour transport furnaces, two high pressure vertical Bridgman furnaces, two low pressure vertical Bridgman furnaces, three zone-melt furnaces, a vapor transport purifying furnace, and a GaAs LPE furnace.
Central to SMART Laboratory is a Class-1000 cleanroom where radiation detectors are fabricated. Te Laboratory is equipped with a scanning electron microscope, Auger electron analyzing system, IV and CV tracers, ellipsometer, probers, radiation sources and Nuclear Instrumentation Module (NIM) electronics to test and characterise radiation detectors and materials.
* Te atomic number which uniquely identifies a chemical element is represented by the symbol Z. Also known as the proton number, it is the number of protons found in the nucleus of an atom and identical to the charge number of the nucleus.
Jim McMahon writes on instrumentation technology. Semiconductor Materials
and Radiological Technologies Laboratory (SMART Lab) is based at Kansas State
University, Kansas, USA.
www.k-state.edu. The Nuclear and Radiological Engineering Department, University of Florida is based
in Gainesville, FL, USA
www.ufl.edu. Minus K Technology Inc is based in Inglewood, CA, USA.
www.minusk.com
Circle 23 or ✔ at
www.scientistlive.com/eurolab
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