With Inspiration From Tetris, Researchers Develop a Better Radiation Detector

taylorvich writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-04-tetris-detector.html

The spread of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in 2011 and the ongoing threat of a possible release of radiation from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex in the Ukrainian war zone have underscored the need for effective and reliable ways of detecting and monitoring radioactive isotopes.

Less dramatically, everyday operations of nuclear reactors, mining and processing of uranium into fuel rods, and the disposal of spent nuclear fuel also require monitoring of radioisotope release.

Now, researchers at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have come up with a computational basis for designing very simple, streamlined versions of sensor setups that can pinpoint the direction of a distributed source of radiation. They also demonstrated that by moving that sensor around to get multiple readings, they can pinpoint the physical location of the source. The inspiration for their clever innovation came from a surprising source: the popular computer game "Tetris."

The team's findings, which could likely be generalized to detectors for other kinds of radiation, are described in a paper published in Nature Communications, by MIT professors Mingda Li, Lin-Wen Hu, Benoit Forget, and Gordon Kohse; graduate students Ryotaro Okabe and Shangjie Xue; research scientist Jayson Vavrek SM '16, Ph.D. '19 at LBNL; and a number of others at MIT and Lawrence Berkeley.

Radiation is usually detected using semiconductor materials, such as cadmium zinc telluride, that produce an electrical response when struck by high-energy radiation, such as gamma rays. But because radiation penetrates so readily through matter, it's difficult to determine the direction that signal came from with simple counting.

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