NE Seminar: “LBNL’s Applied Nuclear Physics Program: Developing Concepts of Radiation Detection”

Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/04/2021
1:55 pm - 2:55 pm

Location
Rhines Hall 125

Categories


Brian Quiter, Ph.D.

Deputy Head, Applied Nuclear Physics Program
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

 

Dr. Brian Quiter was educated at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.S. in Bio-Nuclear Engineering in 2003, his M.S. in 2005 for work related to neutrinoless double-beta decay–relevant material activation, and his Ph.D. degree in Nuclear Engineering in 2010.

Throughout his schooling, Dr. Quiter studied physics of, instrumentation for, and modeling of problems related to nuclear security applications such as nuclear detection problems, passive and active interrogation of intermodal cargo, pre-and post-detonation nuclear forensics, and nuclear safeguards. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled “Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence for Radioactive Materials Assay.” Dr. Quiter joined LBNL in August of 2010, was promoted to staff scientist in 2014 and Deputy Program Head of the Applied Nuclear Physics program in 2019. He has extensive experience modeling radiation transport and radiation detectors, coupling radiation sensors with robotics technologies, planning and performing radiological measurements in uncontrolled environments, and managing the vast and complicated data that multi-sensor systems can produce.

Dr. Quiter leads a research portfolio comprising over 10 scientists and engineers with an annual budget of over $2.5M/year and maintains collaborations with academia, industry and numerous other US National Laboratories.

 

Abstract

Researchers in the Applied Nuclear Physics (ANP) program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have focused on developing new radiation detectors and radiation detection methods to solve problems related to mitigating the effects of nuclear disasters, preventing nuclear proliferation, enhancing nuclear security, and enabling nuclear medicine.

The new methods involve inducing and observing more esoteric signatures in a target medium, creating new radiation detectors to provide better information about distributions of radioactive material, and developing software to take advantage of the additional information these detection systems generate.

This talk will summarize a few new technologies being researched by ANP, including CdZnTe and Cs2LiLa(Br,Cl)6:Ce-based imaging radiation detectors, combining those detectors with robotics technologies to enable our Scene Data Fusion technologies, and our work to leverage signatures induced by new gamma-ray beams to better understand compositions and configurations of materials irradiated by such a beam.