MRI: Development of an Instrument for Precision Controlled Radiation Exposures, Charged Beam Profile Measurement, and Real-time Fluence Monitoring Beyond 10^16 1-MeV-n-equivalent

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Many scientific studies, such as the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), have identified the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)at the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland as the highest priority near-term large project for advancing our knowledge of the fundamental forces of the universe. Detectors at the Large Hadron Collider and other facilities for particle physics discovery record data by responding to energetic particles---radiation---that traverse them. Consequently the detectors themselves must be radiation tolerant. A worldwide program is underway to develop radiation tolerant technologies for detection of particles at planned future colliders. These colliders, for example the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) (scheduled to begin operation around 2023), will typically apply higher energy and luminosity to explore completely new discovery realms, with correspondingly greater radiation penalty. The device that will be built for this award, an instrument for precision controlled radiation exposures, will enable the particle detectors currently being designed for the LHC to operate in that harsh radiation environment. In order to design these new detectors, facilities are needed that can provide very high doses of radiation (10^16 Neutron-equivalent) with focused particle beams for irradiation of candidate technologies. There are very few facilities in the world that can do this and the demand for time to do these tests is extremely high. The automated device that will be built through this award will greatly reduce the time needed to do the irradiation and thus enable many more tests/experiments at facilities such as the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) in New Mexico. Radiation exposure studies are a necessary step in the development of sensors and electronics applied to a broad scope of modern needs including aerospace and defense applications. Graduate and undergraduate physics students participating in this project will receive training in instrument design that is key to their growth as experimenters and important to the development of a globally competitive work force in STEM fields.