Some Recent Applications of Scintillation and Solid State Counters in Chemistry

The high resolution obtainable with semiconductor radiation detectors has extended the scope of neutron activation analysis. Illustrations are nondestructive analysis of archeological artifacts, meteorites and terrestrial rocks. A quite different new technique is the counting of tracks produced by massive energetic particles in glasses and crystals, which has been used, for example, to date ancient uranium containing glasses. The use of scintillation and proportional counters, amplitude selection, coincidence and anti-coincidence techniques, and the Mossbauer effect are discussed for various applications from X-ray crystallography to the detection of neutrino induced reactions. The anisotropic behavior or channelling in silicon detectors has opened a new field of research on the effect of crystal orientation on energy loss of penetrating particles.