The first four naked high purity Germanium detectors were installed successfully in liquid nitrogen in the GENIUS-Test-Facility (GENIUS-TF) in the GRAN SASSO Underground Laboratory on May 5, 2003. This is the first time ever that this novel technique aiming at extreme background reduction in search for rare decays is going to be tested underground. First operational parameters are presented.

The GLAST LAT instrument has been designed for high sensitivity, high precision gamma-ray detection in space. It will contain more than 80m of single-sided AC-coupled silicon detectors. The use of silicon detectors in space will pose special challenges for the design, testing and operation, among them attention to radiation issues unique to the space environment.

Radioactivity of terrestrial radionuclides Ra, Th and K in phosphate rock samples has been measured using gamma ray spectrometry system with an HPGe detector. The samples showed fairly high mean concentrations, 410±39 Bq.kg of Ra, 7.9±0.95 of Th and 37.6±4 of K. Mean absorbed gamma dose rate of 181.9±20 nGy.h was measured in air. Assessment of radiological hazards was made by calculating radium...

The CDF silicon detector is one of the largest silicon detectors in operation. It has a total of 722,432 electronic channels, and it covers a sensor surface area of 6m. The detector has been operating reliably for five years, and it has recorded 1:5 fb 1 of data. This article discusses experiences of operating such a large, complex system as well as the longevity of the detector. r 2007 Elsevie...

We revisit calculations of the cosmogenic production rates for several long-lived isotopes that are potential sources of background in searching for rare physics processes such as the detection of dark matter and neutrinoless double-beta decay. Using updated cosmic-ray neutron flux measurements, we use TALYS 1.0 to investigate the cosmogenic activation of stable isotopes of several detector tar...

We investigate the performance of superconducting nanowire photon detectors fabricated from ultra-thin Nb. A direct comparison is made between these detectors and similar nanowire detectors fabricated from NbN. We find that Nb detectors are significantly more susceptible than NbN to thermal instability (latching) at high bias. We show that the devices can be stabilized by reducing the input res...

The ALPHA experiment has succeeded in trapping antihydrogen, a major milestone on the road to spectroscopic comparisons of antihydrogen with hydrogen. An annihilation vertex detector, which determines the time and position of antiproton annihilations, has been central to this achievement. This detector, an array of double-sided silicon microstrip detector modules arranged in three concentric cy...

This document contains a proposal of the BEPC-II collider beam energy calibration system (IHEP, Beijing). The system is based on Compton backscattering of carbon dioxide laser radiation, producing a beam of high energy photons. Their energy spectrum is then accurately measured by HPGe detector. The high-energy spectrum edge will allow to determine the average electron or positron beam energy ε ...

Radioactivity concentration of Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (NORMs) in shore sediments (samples) collected along the coast of Accra were analyzed using a gamma spectrometry with a high purity germanium detector. The specific activity concentrations range from 8.60 Bqkg to 61.01 Bqkg with a mean of 29.78 Bqkg for K, 0.62 Bqkg to 148.80 Bqkg with a mean of 22.04 Bqkg for Ra and 0.17 ...

One of the goals of hypernuclear physics is to study the properties of baryon-baryon interaction including the strangeness contribution. Double hypernuclei can provide information about the ΛΛ interaction in addition to the hyperon-hyperon and hyperon-nucleus one. A new technique for producing double hypernuclei using antiprotons is foreseen in the PANDA experiment at FAIR. Gamma ray spectrosco...