Extensive export quality reserves of granite, dolerite and marbles which are used for interior decorations as wall facing, paving floors, kitchen counter tops, etc., are available in Azad Kashmir. Since these stones contain radium in trace amounts, therefore, its use as a building material may be a potential source of indoor radon. In order to assess health hazards due to the use of these stone...

Recently, a method for long-term Rn measurements was proposed that combines the radon absorption ability of some polycarbonates, like Makrofol, with their track-etch properties. The method is independent of any particular Rn progeny behavior and the very first evaluation of this approach showed that its range of sensitivity covers practically the entire range of indoor Rn-concentrations. This m...

We report on the measurements of the total charge changing fragmentation cross sections in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions using Fe, Si and Pb incident ions. Several stacks of CR39 nuclear track detectors with different target combinations were exposed at normal incidence to high energy accelerator beams to integrated densities of about 2000 ions/cm. The nuclear track detector foils were...

We report on the laser ablation of composite prismatic structures using a vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) 157 nm F2 laser. Polycarbonate and CR-39 substrates have been intentionally seeded with silver wires and silicon carbide whiskers respectively. The seed particles remain attached to the underlying substrate after laser ablation, forming composite silver-polycarbonate and silicon carbide-CR-39 inte...

One of the primary aims of the MACRO detector at the Gran Sasso lab. (at an average depth of 3700 mwe) was the search in the penetrating cosmic radiation for the supermassive magnetic monopoles (MMs) predicted by Grand Unified Theories of the electroweak and strong interactions; the search was planned for a sensitivity level well below the Parker bound (∼ 10 cm s sr) and for a large range of ve...

background: high and intermediate energy protons are not able to form a track in a solid state nuclear track detector (ssntd) directly. however, such tracks can be formed through secondary particles created during primary radiation nuclear reactions in a ssntd. materials and methods: the protons with primary energies of 9.6 and 30 mev available at the cyclotron accelerator with corresponding lo...

It is proposed that the “threshold for etchable track formation” in plastics is associated with the linear density of activated polymeric clusters along the path of an ion, in the “grain-count regime.” Existing data for CR-39 reveal a change in etching rate in the neighborhood of z/β having the value of about 15-20. We infer that this defines the transition from the grain count regime to the tr...

We present new calibrations of different production batches (from 1989 to 1999) of the INTERCAST CR-39, using the BNL-AGS 1 A GeV iron beam. The comparison with previous results, obtained with the 158 A GeV lead beam from the CERN-SPS shows that, while each production batch has a different calibration curve (mainly due to minor differences in the production conditions), the aging effect is negl...