A New Numerical Approach to Evaluate Variation of Electric Field Strength at the End of Particle Trajectory in Nuclear Track Detectors

Abstract

A geometrical model for an electrochemical etching (ECE) track in a dielectric detector is defined and a primary programme is written to generate the track. The generated track is transformed to an M × N matrix of primary voltages. Using a numerical method, the matrix of final voltages is computed, and using another numerical approach, the electric field strengths in the elements of detector volume are computed. The final field strength at the end of particle trajectory is obtained. The results of our numerical computation show that there are exact correlations between the field strength at the end of particle trajectory and the parameters of track under ECE. It is found that although two traditional models of Mason and Smythe in dielectrics can be partly applied for short and long tracks, none of them are able to explain the behaviour of field strength in a 'general case'. Furthermore, we find that there is an expressive relationship between the field strength and the incidence angle of impacted particle, while the mentioned traditional models are not able to explain this effect.