Radiation equipment

John Tukey said that the best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard. This morning I got to play in IsoTherapeutics‘ backyard. The most photogenic thing on the tour they gave me was their box for working with highly radioactive material with robotic arms. (There was nothing hot inside at the time.)

 

3 thoughts on “Radiation equipment

  1. 1/r^2 is your friend. But an inch of leaded glass sure doesn’t hurt.

    Radiation detection has some great math! Simultaneous multi-isotope identification and localization is a blast. Especially when Homeland Security and DoD is footing the bill.

    I got to play with peak detection, pattern recognition, deconvolution, and PSA/SVD.

    The curse of simultaneous multi-isotope identification and ranging is X-Ray fluorescence and Compton scattering, which wipes out all the (tasty) low-energy gammas. The key is getting data that’s both “good enough” and “fast enough” to beat the statistics.

    Then they ask you to do it in real-time. With sub-degree and sub-meter accuracy. Which we did! LaBr scintillators saved our butts…

    Lots of juicy Googly terms above. Enjoy!

  2. BOBC: I worked on that from the physics side for a few months after Fuckashima! I even got a paper out of it, detecting I131 in BC rainwater and seaweed. I got to work on a lovely HPGe detector.

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