Spark chambers, scintillation and Cerenkov detectors are used extensively in high energy physics experiments. The potential usefulness of semiconductor detectors is being investigated. There is a need for detectors which will identify very high energy particles. The various types of spark chambers are briefly reviewed, including narrow gap, wide gap and filmless chambers. Applications of scinti...

A high voltage and nanosecond Blumlein pulse generator has been developed to produce an output pulse whose voltage level is greater than 250 kV and pulse duration 5 ns. The generator consists of various components such as a charging circuit, a pulse transformer, and a spark gap switch. As a heart of the generator, a Blumlein pulse forming line has been constructed in the cylindrical form using ...

A laser excited, sub-nanosecond, pulsed electron beam system is described. The system consists of a high voltage pulser and a coaxial triggered spark gap. The liquid spark gap discharges into a pulse forming line designed to produce and maintain a flat voltage pulse of 1ns duration on the cathode of a photodiode. A synchronized laser is used to illuminate the photo-cathode to produce an electro...

The importance of the photon-photon pair production process (γ + γ′ → e+ + e−) to form pair production cascades in pulsar polar caps is investigated within the framework of the Ruderman-Sutherland vacuum gap model. It is found that this process is unimportant if the polar caps are not hot enough, but will play a non-negligible role in the pair formation cascades when the polar cap temperatures ...

The need for modern data analytics to combine relational, procedural, and map-reduce-style functional processing is widely recognized. State-of-the-art systems like Spark have added SQL front-ends and relational query optimization, which promise an increase in expressiveness and performance. But how good are these extensions at extracting high performance from modern hardware platforms? While S...