Detection of bubble nucleation event in superheated drop detector by the pressure sensor

Abstract

Superheated drop detector consisting of drops of superheated liquid suspended in polymer or gel matrix is of great demand, mainly because of its insensitivity to s-particles and ?-rays and also because of the low cost. The bubble nucleation event is detected by measuring the acoustic shock wave released during the nucleation process. The present work demonstrates the detection of bubble nucleation events by using the pressure sensor. The associated circuits for the measurement are described in this article. The detection of events is verified by measuring the events with the acoustic sensor. The measurement was done using drops of various sizes to study the effect of the size of the drop on the pressure recovery time. Probability of detection of events has increased for larger size of the superheated drops and lesser volume of air in contact with the gel matrix. The exponential decay fitting to the pressure sensor signals shows the dead time for pressure recovery of such a drop detector to be a few microseconds.