Novel Silicon Carbide Detector for Active Inspections

The need to address increasingly challenging inspection requirements (such as large volume objects, very fast inspection throughputs, potentially significant shielding, etc.) for such items as nuclear materials and explosives will require the use of active interrogation technologies. While these active technologies can successfully address these challenges by inducing unique, temporal signatures, the inspection environment will also induce overall “background signals” that can be orders of magnitude larger than the induced signatures. Detectors that can successfully operate in these types of customized, inspection environments (pulsed and continuous) and successfully extract induced signature data are clearly needed and will effectively define the limitations of any active inspection system. A novel silicon carbide detector is now being investigated to successfully address both neutron- and photon/bremsstrahlung-type inspection applications. While this paper describes this detector and highlights efforts related to neutron inspection, it will focus on its neutron and gamma-ray/photon detection performance in neutron- and bremssstrahlung-type inspection applications.