An ionization chamber for fission fragment analysis

Fission fragments play a pivotal role in understanding the entire nuclear fission process, and their effects are widespread to all applications involving nuclear fission: reactor design and maintenance, waste removal, active and passive integration of nuclear materials, simulations, and the fundamental theories of fission. Currently, experimental data on the characteristic properties of fission fragment distributions is lacking at variable neutron energies as well as with sufficient uncertainty, and therefore better experimental data is desired. To achieve this goal, the Spectrometer for Ion Detection in Fission Research project (SPIDER) is being designed which uses high resolution measurements and eventby-event analysis to increase the amount of nuclear fission data available [White]. As a collaborator, we are building and testing an ionization chamber to be used for the SPIDER project which will ultimately take place at the LANSCE facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory.