A Survey of the Applications and Limitations of Various Types of Detectors in Radiation Energy Measurement

This paper provides a collection of data relevant to the use of various types of semiconductor detector in nuclear spectroscopy and gives examples of the use of detectors in specific experimental applications. Basic data on absorption of various kinds of radiation in germanium and silicon are given, and these are related to the characteristics of different types of semiconductor detectors. A brief outline of the optimization procedure for the detector-amplifier system to obtain good energy resolution follows. Included in a brief review of applications of detectors are examples in the fields of a-particle spectrometry, high-energy particle reactions, and low-temperature nuclear alignment studies. we must recognize that a research worker in one institution may be able to use the latest types of detector while a worker elsewhere might find it difficult to obtain "state of the art" devices. It is tempting to neglect the more recent devices, which are available to only a select few, but commercial exploitation of solid-state detectors is so rapid that we would then be restricting the usefulness of the paper to a period of a few months at the most. In these circumstances, I have chosen to discuss applications of detectors in nuclear spectroscopy at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory , where the diversity of users is probably as large as in any laboratory. Abstract Introduction