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Sandia is focused on creating new materials that could result in improved, lower-cost detectors.
Commercial vendors are producing lanthanum bromide, a promising scintillator material, but are unable to create the large crystals needed for detection systems. Sandia is doing basic research to better understand the material and produce large crystals without the stress and cracking seen in today’s crystals.
In addition, Sandia has capabilities for researching nano-size scintillator materials, with the goal of creating custom composites that meet exacting properties specifications.
Sandia is also exploring the use of advanced ceramic processes to fabricate large, optical-quality polycrystalline lanthanum halide scintillators to replace small single crystals produced by the conventional Bridgman growth method. If successful, these processes will yield highly sensitive materials for gamma ray detection at low manufacturing costs, allowing practical and rapid identification of radioactive materials in a variety of applications.
A sensitive semiconductor material that could enable spectrometric detection of fission neutrons with directional resolution at considerable distance would greatly facilitate identification of contraband SNM. Of the semiconductors, single crystalline diamond grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on a diamond gemstone offers the best detector properties, but is prohibitively expensive and diminutive.
Sandia proposes to use new techniques to grow single crystalline diamond and evaluate its detection capabilities. This effort will combine Sandia’s excellent materials diagnostic capabilities with expertise in diamond synthesis from the laboratory of Professor Brage Golding, which pioneered heteroepitaxial diamond growth in the United States, and the neutron sensor testing capabilities at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Sandia materials researchers are examining materials that offer increased detection sensitivity, while meeting real-world size and cost constraints. For example: