A Solid State Scintillation Detector

Efforts to substitute a solid state device for the usual photomultiplier of a scintillation type nuclear detector led to the photoconductive cell. Although extremely sensitive, cadmium sulfide responds slowly to low levels of light, and a technique providing improvement over several orders of magnitude failed to achieve measurement of individual pulses. In an integrating application, however, such a method makes possible a simple, reliable, and inexpensive instrument for measuring, alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron dose rates over a wide range of operation.