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Particle detector
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In experimental and applied particle physics, a particle detector, also known as a radiation detector, is a device used to detect, track, and/or identify high-energy particles, such as produced by nuclear decay, cosmic radiation, or reactions in a particle accelerator. Modern detectors are also used as calorimeters to measure energy of the detected radiation. They may also be used to measure other attributes such as momentum, spin, charge etc. of the particles.
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Detectors designed for modern accelerators are huge, both in size and in cost. The term "counter" is often used instead of detector, when the detector counts the particles but does not resolve its energy or ionization. Particle detectors usually can also track ionizing radiation (high energy photons or even visible light). If their main purpose is radiation measurement, they are called radiation detector, but as photons can also be seen as (massless) particles, the term particle detector is still correct.
'Types of particle detectors
The detectors invented and used so far may be broadly divided into three families as follows:
- Ionization detectors
- Gas Ionization detectors
- Liquid Ionization detectors
- Solid Ionization detectors
- Scintillation detectors
- Semiconductor detectors
Examples
- Bubble chamber
- Calorimeter
- Cherenkov detector, Aerogel detector
- Dosimeter
- Drift chamber,Jet chamber
- Electroscope
- Gaseous ionization detectors (Ionization chamber, Proportional counter, Geiger-Müller tube)
- Lucas cell
- MicroStrip Gas Chamber (MSGC)
- Multiwire Proportional Chamber (MWPC)
- Photodiodes
- Photographic plates
- Photomultiplier
- RICH (Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector)
- Scintillation counter
- Semiconductor detector
- Silicon detector
- Spark chamber,Wire chamber
- Straw chamber
- Streamer tube
- Time of flight detector
- Time projection chamber (TPC)
- Transition radiation detector
- Wilson cloud chamber, Diffusion chamber
- Z-sensitive Ionization and Phonon Detector coupled Superconducting Transition Edge Sensors (ZIP detectors)
Modern detectors in particle physics combine several of the above elements in layers much like an onion.
- Filmstrips
- "Radiation detectors". H. M. Stone Productions, Schloat. Tarrytown, N.Y., Prentice-Hall Media, 1972.
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