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Recently, rather a lot of attention has been given to inexpensive radiation detectors, primarily for the measurement of muons produced by cosmic rays. Since most commercial systems costs on the order of hundreds to thousands of €/CHF/$, the advent of such maker driven detectors is very welcome and relevant. However, most of these low cost (≈€100-200) detectors are based on Geiger-Müller tubes or scintillators with little or no energy resolution. At the Niels Bohr Institute, we have developed a low cost (€100) gamma ray detector (NBI BiGS) and have identified a low cost, highly performant commercially available digitizer which allow one to measure gamma ray energy spectra in the range 80-1000keV. By combining two such detectors, one can make a table top PET scanner which illustrates how such systems work.
In this seminar, we will describe the detector and the detection system and how we have used them in teaching and outreach. The seminar will close with an interactive discussion on how we might evaluate the effectiveness of such detectors as a learning tool as well as in promoting nuclear and particle physics as an interesting and important field of study.
CERN Physics Education Research Team