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Presents an overview of the papers selected by the 'IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science' journal from the European Conference on Radiation and its Effects on Components and Systems in 2000. Information on the conference; Target applications for the conference's workshop; Members of the conference's organizing committee.

The paper discusses the experimental validation of fault injection analyses performed with the FLIPPER tool. Failure probabilities obtained by fault injection were compared against failure probabilities obtained at accelerated proton testing of a benchmark design provided by the European Space Agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-empirical fitting based on classical Bohr theory has been applied to the experimental LET data in silicon of the RADEF heavy ion cocktail species. The parameterized LET descriptions to be used in the European Component Irradiation Facilities are introduced and compared with the commonly used estimations from SRIM-code. Also, a new user interface, ECIF Cocktail Calculator, based on this work, has been published under the RADEF webpages at xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="http://www.jyu.fi/accelerator/radef/ECIFCalc" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"http://www.jyu.fi/accelerator/radef/ECIFCalc. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The radiation effects community has developed a number of hardness assurance test guidelines to assess and assure the radiation hardness of integrated circuits for use in space and/or high-energy particle accelerator applications. These include test guidelines for total dose hardness assurance qualification and single event effects (SEE) qualification. In this work, issues associated with these hardness assurance test guidelines are discussed. For total dose qualification, the main test methodologies used in the U.S. and Europe are reviewed and differences between the guidelines are discussed. In addition, some key issues that must be considered when performing total dose hardness assurance testing are addressed. Following these discussions we review some emerging issues relevant to SEE device qualification that are not covered in present SEE test guidelines. The hardness assurance implications of these issues are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile-Dose has been designed for a very innovative use: the integration in a robotic machinery for automatic preparation of radioactive doses, to be injected to patients in Nuclear Medicine Departments, with real time measurement of the activity under preparation. Mobile-Dose gives a constant measurement of the dose during the filling of vials or syringes, triggering the end of the filling process based on a predefined dose limit. Several applications of Mobile-Dose have been delivered worldwide, from Italian hospitals and clinics to European and Japanese ones. The design of such an instrument and its integration in robotic machineries, was required by an Italian company specialised in radiation protection tools for nuclear applications, in the period 2001-2003. At the time of its design, apparently no commercial instruments with a suitable interfacing capability to the external world existed: we designed it in order to satisfy all the strict requirements coming from the medical aspects (precision within 10%, repeatability, stability, time response) and from the industrial conceiving principles that are mandatory to ensure a good reliability in such a complicated environment. The instrument is suitable to be used in standalone mode too, thanks to its portability and compactness and to the intelligent operator panel programmed for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This work describes the production and quality control of the multi-wire proportional chamber for the LHCb muon detection system. The European Laboratory of Particle Physics (CERN) is in charge of the production of 134 chambers for the inner regions of the five Muon Stations. These chambers have demanding requirements on rate capability (>100 kHz/cm²) and efficiency (>99%) in a short time window (20 ns), on overall response uniformity which has to be better than 30%, and on the aging properties. The technical design of the chambers is briefly presented, and the production line is described together with the quality assurance and quality control programs. This includes fabrication of the panels; wire winding, gluing, and soldering; gap uniformity control; pitch and wire tension measurement; gas leak tests; high-voltage training; and tests under intense radiation. An original method developed for gas gain uniformity measurements is described in detail, and the obtained results are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methods to test the practical performance of the Philips Gemini PET/CT system during clinical imaging are described and results presented. The test methods used were based on the NEMA standards and those suggested by a task group of the Commission of European Communities (EEC). These were performed using the EEC emission phantom, and phantoms provided by Philips. Scans were acquired using the routine clinical protocols. Images were reconstructed using a 3D row action maximum likelihood algorithm (RAMLA). Attenuation correction (AC) was applied using CT data (CTAC) and Cs-137 source transmission scans (CsAC). Images can be acquired with the PET and CT gantries closed or open. Results of tests on the gantry alignment show that the static offsets varied by a maximum of 4.5 mm when the system was first installed, but as the floor has settled these variations have decreased to a maximum of 2.5 mm. The mean negative nonuniformity was -4.8 ± 1.1% and -5.3 ± 1.1% for CsAC and CTAC respectively and the mean positive nonuniformity was 4.7 ± 1.4% and 5.5 ± 1.6%. Scatter fraction measurements were made in the EEC body phantom. The reconstructed scatter fractions were 0.18 and 0.16 with and without out-of-field-of-view activity respectively (±OFOVA) for both CsAC and CTAC images. The sinogram-derived (NEMA NU 2-1994) scatter fraction was 0.44 and 0.43 ± OFOVA. At the centre of the field of view (FOV) the transverse spatial resolution (SR) was 5.0 mm in air (5.0 mm in water) and the axial SR was 6.0 mm (6.8 mm). 10 cm away from the centre the transverse radial SR was 5.4 mm (5.3 mm), the transverse tangential SR was 5.2 mm (5.4 mm) and the axial SR was 6.6 mm (7.2 mm). The recovery coefficients demonstrate the partial volume effect. The AC accuracy was similar in water (both 0.2 ± 0.1%) and Teflon [10.9 ± 1.9% (CTAC) and 10.0 ± 2.0% (CsAC)], for both types of AC, but very different in air [14.3 ± 2.2% (CTAC) and 31.3 ± 1.5% (CsAC)]. If the transmission maps were not segmented prior to AC these gave much higher and very different residual AC errors. The peak noise equivalent count rate was 45.2 kcps at 184 MBq and 25.2 kcps at 127 MBq ± OFOVA. The system sensitivity to true and scattered counts was 34.1 kcps/(kBq/cm³) and to true counts was 19.4 kcps/kBq/cm³). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dose Estimation by Simulation of the ISS Radiation Environment (DESIRE) project aims to accurately calculate radiation fluxes and doses to astronauts inside the European Columbus module of the International Space Station using Geant4. Since Geant4 has not been previously used for this type of application it needs to be validated. This will be followed by a detailed evaluation of the incident radiation fields on ISS and culminate with the geometry modeling and full-scale flux and dose simulations for Columbus. Geant4 validation studies and comparisons to other tools are presented. These concern the angle and energy distributions of particles leaving irradiated targets and of energy depositions in the targets. Comparisons are made between simulations using different Geant4 physics models, experimental data, and other particle transport programs. Geant4 using the "Binary Cascade" model for inelastic nucleon reactions performs very well in these comparisons, but some issues with other models remain to be resolved if they are to be used for space radiation shielding applications. Results of Geant4 simulations of the transport of some relevant radiation field components through the hull of a simplified model of Columbus are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the creation of a technical remote participation infrastructure for nuclear fusion research collaboratory for the scientific exploitation of the Joint European Torus (JET) Facilities in Europe. Background on the JET Facilities under the European Fusion Development Agreement; Details on the remote participation technical measures; Status of the creation process as of April 2002.