Klein and his team of MIT researchers have created a new viable type of nuclear scanner based on a technology using neutron beams for detection.
About 5 years ago, MIT professor Aren Douglas became intrigued by a method developed by Los Alamos researchers to identify what substances were inside a container without opening it up.
The Technique Itself
This method called neutron resonance transmission analysis is based on log established principles. Principles stating that when neutrons pass through some materials, their nuclei will absorb only the neutrons with a particular energy level and let everything else through.
This means that the nucleus acts like a filter and by detecting the neutrons which have been absorbed, we can create a sort of fingerprint for select isotopes. Indium, Silver, etc can be detected this way.
One of the reasons this is so useful is because it can detect Uranium. By detecting Uranium it is able to scan for and tell the status of Nuclear warheads and can catch smuggling, etc. It can also detect the amount of fuel left in a nuclear reactor.
MIT's Downsized Scanner
What the Researchers at MIT did
There were a few problems with the initial apparatus from Los Alamos. It was too large (a couple of hundred meters long) and very expensive (a few million dollars).
The new design has a Deuterium-Tritium generator right in front of a detector and a tube of the material. Although this may seem very straightforward, it’s a lot harder to shrink the tube down. The first problem is to decrease the energy of the produced neutrons and ensure the interference from surrounding neutrons doesn’t change the reading.
Though their progress was delayed by the Pandemic, they managed to finish this project and are preparing a paper right now. We hope to see more from this technology in the near future.
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