High Efficiency Low-cost Nanocomposite for Radiation Detection Enabled by Charge Triggered Secondary Charge Injection

This research project explores a new nanocomposite device for ionizing radiation detection that has an unprecedented high internal gain to enable detection efficiency comparable to that of state-of-art single crystal detectors and attain the energy information of radiation, is inexpensive to produce, and can be scaled up for a broad range of deployments. This detection idea leverages on our recently discovered, highly sensitive nanocomposite photodetectors that have two to three orders of magnitude of higher detection efficiency compared to commercial silicon detectors. The combination of high gain and low noise is expected to result in an ionizing radiation detector with unprecedented sensitivity. The low-cost nanocomposite radiation detection devices can then be scaled up to any size by folding/rolling of the flexible, thin film devices