Electrical Breakdown and Optical Emission Properties of High Pressure Pulsed RF Gas Discharges

Abstract

A fundamentally new technique for the measurement of the number of subexcitation electrons produced by the passage of ionizing radiation (electromagnetic and high energy charged particles) through a gas has been developed by us during the past few years [1–5]. The new detector is based on the digital characterization of the electrons in the particle track produced by the ionizing radiation where the charged particle track is registered by measuring the number of electrons found in given subvolumes of the gas in the ionization chamber [6–10]. The track is thus characterized by a set of integers in each volume element, from which parameters such as the track length and energy can be measured. We have specifically developed this technique for use in the field of microdosimetry, where the study of the fluctuations in the energy deposition in the charged particle track on the order of the molecular to cellular (i. e., nanometers to microns) dimensions is important in understanding the chemical and biological effects of ionizing radiation [2,4,6]. If the charged particle is a recoil nucleus produced by a neutron interaction, the energy deposited and the linear energy transfer can be inferred from this information, allowing the detector to act as neutron spectrometer [3, 11]. In principle, the detector can be used for any application that requires knowledge of the three dimensional locations of single electrons in a gas [1,12].KeywordsParticle TrackLinear Energy TransferElectron Drift VelocityCollisional QuenchingNeutron DosimetryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.