Emulating Nuclear Emissions With a Pulsed Laser

This paper presents an approach to emulate the Poisson process observed by a sensor when subject to low levels of radiation, motivated by the problem of detecting a weak source in the presence of background radiation. We construct a physical emulation of this process to serve as a means of experimentation for various detection models involving mobile sensor networks. A pulsing laser emulates the nuclear emission, and a rotating mirror deflects the pulses in a random direction. The degree to which the proposed emulation process matches actual radiation measurement results is assessed experimentally, and the utility of the device is demonstrated and compared against conventional methods in a simple detection scenario.