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Detectors with microchannel plates (MCPs) are currently widely used in photon and charged particle detection with high spatial (∼10 μm) and temporal (<0.5 ns) resolution. All the advances in MCP detection technologies can be successfully implemented for the detection of thermal neutrons by using MCPs manufactured from a modified glass mixture doped with neutron absorbing atoms. In this paper, we compare the efficiency of thermal neutron detection for two standard MCP geometries: circular-pore and square-pore MCPs doped with the 10B isotope. The results of our modeling indicate that the detection of thermal neutrons with a square-pore MCP is 11%-23% more efficient than for the circular geometry, and can be higher than 70% for the existing MCP technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A monolithic X- and gamma-ray detector based on a silicon drift detector coupled to a CsI(TI) scintillator is presented. The detector is operated both as a direct X-ray detector for photons interacting in silicon and as an indirect detector for photons interacting in the scintillator. As interactions in silicon and in CsI yield different amount of charge per unit energy deposited, discrimination of the place of interaction is necessary to obtain the correct energy. Discrimination of the interaction type is carried out by means of pulse shape discrimination performed with two parallel processing chains with different shaping times. In this paper an extensive characterization of the detector with temperature is presented. It is shown that cooling the detector at 10 ° allows to obtain a nearly 100% efficiency between 8 and 200 keV. Further cooling below 0 °C allows pulse shape discrimination with 100% accuracy throughout the detector's energy range. The detector has also been tested with X-rays at various energies by means of a tun- able X-ray facility. These tests allowed an investigation of the light yield nonproportionality in CsI(Tl) at low energies, necessary for a proper energy calibration of the detector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of total ionizing dose on a commercial optomechanical microswitch has been studied in this paper. One microswitch was irradiated using a Co60γ-ray radiation source at a dose rate of 330 rad/h to total dose up to 22.5 krad (Si). Little effect was observed in this device which is consistent with the technological design that does not contain insulators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LHCb is one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It aims to make precision measurements of CP violation in the B-meson decays. The detector simulation of LHCb was developed using the GEANT4 software toolkit interfaced to the LHCb software framework named GAUDI. This is now being used for a large production run of 210 million events. An important feature of the LHCb experiment is the use of Ring Imaging Cherenkov Counters (RICH) for particle identification. The Cherenkov photons created in this detector are focused onto an array of photodetectors made of Hybrid Photon Detectors. A brief overview of the GEANT4 based LHCb simulation program named GAUSS will be given with the main emphasis on RICH simulation and its verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]