National Research & Development Laboratory Applications

Neutrino Detection System

Customer Case

Neutrinos are tiny (possibly massless) neutral elementary particles which interact with matter via the weak nuclear force. The weakness of the weak force gives neutrinos the property that matter is almost transparent to them. The sun, and all other stars, produce neutrinos copiously due to nuclear fusion and decay processes within the core. Since they rarely interact, these neutrinos pass through the sun and the earth (and you) unhindered. Other sources of neutrinos include exploding stars (supernovae), relic neutrinos (from the birth of the universe) and nuclear power plants (in fact a lot of the fuel’s energy is taken away by neutrinos). For example, the sun produces over two hundred trillion trillion trillion neutrinos every second, and a supernova blast can unleash 1000 times more neutrinos than our sun will produce in its 10-billion year lifetime. Billions of neutrinos stream through your body every second, yet only one or two of the higher energy neutrinos will scatter from you in your lifetime.

The customer needs to monitor the signal strength coming off a Helium 3 Detector. The Helium 3 Detector is used to break away the extra Neutron in Heavy Water. Heavy water is produced by adding an extra Neutron to each Hydrogen molecule. The signal bandwidth does not exceed 500MHz. The current PCI Bus Mastering Transfer Rate requirement is 3-5MB/s.

GaGe Case Solution

GaGe’s CompuScope 82G with a 500MHz bandwidth is perfectly suited for this application. A minimum of 4 times oversampling will give adequate representation of the signal. CompuScope 82G is able to achieve 5-10MB/s transfer rates, and so fulfills the requirement.

GaGe Case Recommended Products

Research & Development Application Request

We encourage you to contact us and discuss your research & development application in more detail with our engineering team. GaGe can provide tailored custom data acquisition hardware and software solutions to meet specific application requirements.