Advanced Concepts in Radiation Detection and Measurement
Graduate-level laboratory on radiation detection, measurement, and instrumentation.
Link to NE204 Github
Instructor
- Ross Barnowski (rossbar@berkeley.edu)
- Office hours: Wednesdays, 9AM - 1PM | 1110B Etcheverry Hall
Assistants and Guest Lecturers
- Joseph Curtis (jccurtis@lbl.gov)
- Dr. Marco Salathe (MSalathe@lbl.gov)
- Dr. Stephen Derenzo (SEDerenzo@lbl.gov)
- Dr. Peter Marleau (pmarlea@sandia.gov)
- Dr. Erik Brubaker (ebrubak@sandia.gov)
- Dr. Brian Lenardo (blenardo@stanford.edu)
Session Dates
- Lecture: Tu & Th 2-3 PM | 54 Barrows Hall
- Lab: Wed 2-6 PM | 1110B Etcheverry Hall
Prerequisites
All students must have completed coursework in introductory nuclear physics (NE 101 or equivalent) and the undergraduate radiation instrumentation laboratory (NE 104 or equivalent). Graduate standing required for enrollment.
Additional coursework including introductory signals and systems (EE 20, BioE 165 or equivalent) and introduction to imaging (NE 107 would be beneficial but is not required.
Course texts
There is no required textbook for the course. The following textbooks are recommended:
- Glenn F. Knoll, Radiation Detection and Measurement, 4th Ed
- Helmuth Spieler, Semiconductor Detector Systems
- Gordon Gilmore, Practical Gamma-ray Spectrometry
The following are excellent references for collaborative, reproducible workflows for scientific computing:
- Huff & Scopatz, Effective Computation in Physics
- Chacon & Straub, Pro Git
Computation
This course is structured around modern best-practices for reproducibility and collaboration in technical investigation. Further details on the motivation and structuring of the course can be found here. While not required, it is strongly recommended that students use a *NIX-flavored OS, preferably one of the many distributions of Linux. For students who do not have such systems available, a virtual machine running Ubuntu 16.04 is provided that has been pre-configured with all of the tools used in the course (git, scientific python, LaTeX, etc.). The VM is available for download here, and can be run with Oracle VirtualBox. The password for the student user in the VM is NE204fall2018.