Hello everyone, I am hope and will help be helping moderate today's webinar. I would like to welcome everyone to Modern Radiation Experiments for Higher Education webinar. Before we get started today, I'd like to go over some housekeeping. At the top left of your screen you will see our Q&A chat box. Please ask questions throughout the presentation and we will answer as many as possible within our time constraints. On the left side of your screen is a resource list with more documentation on what we will discuss today. You will also see Contact us in there if you would like to talk to one of our representatives. And if you don't want to miss any future webinars, please sign up for our mailing list. On the bottom you will see we are running an e-learning promotion Buy 2 Get 2 free, which is available until December 31st. Click on View Now to check out the details. All of your windows are adjustable, so feel free to move them for your best feeling. And most importantly, if for some reason you are having trouble viewing this webinar at any point, please refresh your browser. This webinar will be recorded and available at Mirion.com/webinars for future viewing. Here you can also see all of our past webinars. The link is in our resource section. Today's webinar will be presented by Mike Engelsman. Mike has been with Mirion for 37 years and currently holds the position of Application Support Group Manager. I will now turn the presentation over to Mike. Thank you, Hope. Welcome everybody. Thank you for attending our series of webinars. Today we're talking about modern radiation experiments for higher education. We're going to go about 45 minutes, which leaves us about 15 minutes for Q&A. So I apologize if I run a little bit long. I think we can run maybe 10 minutes after noon, but we'll have to cut it off then. Just to let you know, if we don't get to your questions at the end, we are logging them. So we will make sure that we answer everyone's questions. We don't do it Live Today, Okay. So the outline of what we're going to be doing in the next 45 minutes is I wanted to talk to you about our product called the Lab Kit. We have two flavors of it, the basic and the advanced lab kit it. Both of them use our prospect software. For those of you that have been Canberra or Marian customers for years, you might be familiar with our Genie software. We wrote prospect software specifically for the lab kits, a little bit easier for the student to get up and running on. I have a about one slide for each of the 12 experiments, so it's going to be a little bit dense on the slide presentation for that. I apologize. It's just the best way to get all of this information in in 45 minutes for you. So we'll discuss the experiments, we'll discuss what else you can do with the equipment. We're going to finish with a customer testimonial and interspersed in here we have a couple of poll questions for you, if you don't mind us pausing the presentation for you to answer poll questions and then we'll wrap it up with the quality with the Q&A. Okay, first poll question. I'm going to pause here for about 30 seconds. If you wouldn't mind, please could you answer the question of do you have and use Nim Electronics? So I'll give this about 30 seconds. We'd love to hear from you on our little informal poll here. OK, I'm going to. I'm going to move on. Let's see the results of our informal poll. It looks like I'm about split half and half. Some some do and use their Nim electronics, the other half do not. Thank you for that okay introduction. What you're looking at is the cover of the laboratory manual for our lab kits. It is a spiral bound lab kit. You get one of the lab manuals per kit and it is a set of 12 nuclear science experiments. We're focusing on gamma ray spectroscopy. Obviously, you may choose that to teach neutron detection, alpha detection, beta detection. You'll have the right equipment if you want to add those detectors yourself, but we focus in the lab kits on gamma ray spectroscopy. Importantly, each of the experiments we're providing in the lab manual with step by step instructions for the students. So if you're the instructor, you do not have to write up the lesson plans. We sort of did that for you in the lab manual. I do want to point out, we'll point it out a few times today because we're using modern electronics, namely the Osprey and the links. These instruments can be connected directly to your building network. So students could remotely access these experiments. Clearly, you'd have to have somebody in the lab to move sources around, etcetera and position things and maybe have a camera to show the students that they're in place, but they can remotely access these experiments. So there are two product offerings we have, the basic Lab kit and the Advanced Lab Kit and and the Basic kit covers experiments one to five. The Advanced Kit is experiment 6 to 12. All right, a few things to note here. These are turnkey solutions, turnkey with the exception that you provide the PC to load the prospect software on. And there's a handful of sources that you may have already or you need to procure to make the experiments work. This is modern equipment. This is what we're providing to customers for modern state-of-the-art solutions for other applications. And it is the kind of equipment that your students when they get out of their professional career, they get a job, they're working at a research lab, etcetera. This is the equipment that they will see there. So that makes sense to have them trained in your class On modern equipment. This is much simpler to set up than it used to be in the old days, digital MC A's, you've got a lot less wires, it's much less cluttered and you're up and running quicker than in the days of Nim Electronics as an example. And the Prospect software, It's a very simple user interface and we're going to show you that in a few moments. A few moments. As opposed to if if some of you use our high-powered Genie software which does a great job. The learning curve is is fairly steep on Genie and it's harder to get a student up and running quickly. Prospect does offer one nice function. Actually, I wish we had it in Genie. There's a backup and a restore function and I wanted to point it out because what you would do as the instructor is you would get the equipment set up the way you want it and do a backup. And then when the students leave, after they've done their training, who knows what they've done to the system. You can simply click on restore and it'll put the system back the way it was before the students got in. Okay the lab kit, the basic experiments one to five. What you get with the basic lab kit is you get our Osprey Digital Two base MCA. The Osprey contains the Multi Channel Analyzer, digital signal processing, and a suitable high voltage supply. I think it's up to 1500 volts with A14 pin. This is an industry standard connection. You connect the Osprey via Ethernet or USB, your choice. We're providing A2 inch by two inch sodium iodide detector to plug into the Osprey a copy of our Prospect gamma spectroscopy software. The lab kit table which you see in this picture here. This is the black table and we have painted on it different angles for some of the experiments. There's a scattering pillar. There is a detector shield, which you see here. The detector gets inserted horizontally. You can hit run it wide open. You can put a plug over the detector. That's useful if you're doing background measurements, let's say, or a calamation slit. We're also including a source shield and holder with a slit in the front. The source is inserted from this side. It's a capsule source season 137. It screws onto that rod and you can secure it in place inside of its shield. Do take note that because of the experiments for scattering we need a fairly strong source. This is 1/2 of a military of CZ137 or 15 mega Becker L, so you might want to just confirm that your source license allows you to have something that's strong. Also included in the basic kit are a series of absorbers. We give you 5 plates each of various thicknesses of aluminum, copper, lead and polyethylene because we're going to do an attenuation experiment. So that's that's what's included in the basic lab kit in the lab manual at the beginning. This is for the instructors, it's a very useful matrix of the 12 experiments. This allows you to easily see what equipment you need to get out of the storeroom etcetera to get set up for the students and whether that equipment is part of the the basic kit, whether that is specific sources that are going to be used or whether it's equipment that's also used in the advanced kit. So very, very simple to figure out what equipment you need to lay out for the day. OK Before we get to the individual experiments, I wanted to pause for a moment and talk about prospect. This is what the screen of prospect looks like. Those of you that have used Genie or are using Genie, you'll notice that looks slightly different. Little bit more of a modern user interface, a little bit more intuitive to the first first time user. But it is very powerful. It only supports the links to or the links and the osprey MC A's. I know we make a lot of other MC A's we have in the past and we do currently. Prospect is only for the links in the Ospreys. Very conveniently, one of the things Prospect can do for you is you can the student can export the data directly to Excel. So when the student is wrapping up in the lab and they want to get this in an Excel format so they can write up their report in their apartment or their dorm later on, they simply click one button which looks like an Excel icon and it exports it. I will mention also that when you store the actual spectrum, we're storing the excuse me, we're storing the MCA settings. That wasn't really possible in the NIM days. Your student gets back and they're going to write up the report and they wondered, Gee, I wonder what the high voltage was that we used in the experiment. Well, they're going to know it because it's stored with the MCA setting, with the spectrum. At this stage, I would like Gabriella Eily, who is the product manager for this. She's going to launch for you. We're going to do just a brief short demonstration on prospect so you can take a look at it. Gabriella. Yes, I will share my screen. Can you see my screen? Yes. No. OK, thank you. Prospect is not up. OK, let me try that again because I have it up on my there we go, Thank you Gabriella. So what she's going to be showing here is one of the buttons at the bottom in Prospect is connect to MCA and you simply from the pull down list it would give you the list of Mca's that are connected or in our case we don't have one. Gabriella does not have one in her office there at the factory. So it prospect does include like Jeannie does a simulator and so she's going to put in an IP address and click simulate device and then click on connect and that pops up our MCAA. Couple of items to note here. The way to start acquisition, Gabriella will start this now is the universal play button right there at the top, just like you have on a CD player. Yes, we have to turn on high voltage first, just like a real detector. You have to have high voltage on before you get any accounts out of a detector. So she's turned the high voltage on. Thank you, Gabriella. I was. I did that out of order. Now we can turn on acquisition and we get a spectrum running. This simulates A germanium spectrum. What I wanted to point out to you folks is that across the top you'll see a couple of green lights and a couple of red lights. That is indicate to the students that acquisition is on, high voltage is on. There's a digital stabilizer if it was on and to the right of that, it will show you the dead time. So you get a nice graphical indication of the dead time. If we had preset to a certain time, the progress bar to the right of that would be showing. So you could from across the room student could see what progress they've made, for instance, on a 10 minute count, et cetera. All right. Gabriella, do you think we have enough statistics yet to draw a region of interest or you want to let it go for a little while, maybe a few more seconds? Plan the spectrum here, OK? By the way, folks, this is intended to be a shallow dive into the prospect software. If you would like a more detailed demonstration of all of the capabilities, we can certainly do that for you individually, just contact us. But for the purposes of the demo, I just wanted you to get exposed to it a little bit to see what it is that a student would do. For example. So Gabriella has drawn a region of interest very quickly by just dragging her left mouse button across a a peak and you notice that a a balloon pops up or a window in the upper right hand corner. This tells the student what the centroid energy of this peak is and gives them the net and the total number of counts in that peak. That's the information that the student is going to want to write down in their in their log book for most of these experiments. So very simple, you connect to the device, you start the acquisition after turning on the high voltage and extract the peak information via reasons of interest. Thank you, Gabrielle. I think that that's all that we wanted to cover on prospect, isn't it? Yes, yes, Okay. All right. Thank you, Okay. So let's get on to the experiments. Experiment #1, Gamma ray interaction with scimilators. The student in this experiment, this is the first time they're going to be touching a detector connecting it to the computer. They're going to do an energy calibration and they're going to observe. From the spectrum are three favorites, the photoelectric effect, Compton scattering, and pair production. So this is the basics. I'm pointing this out to you here. I'll show it for experiment number one. For every one of the 12 experiments there is an experiment guide. So in the manual, each student will have a step by step set of instructions in the proper order of exactly what they need to do and a table of how they need to set up the electronics. So this makes it very very simple for the student to quickly get through these exercises. Experiment two is counting statistics and error prediction. Experiment #2, the student takes I think it's a series of 20 background Spectra and source based Spectra and then applies uncertainty analysis to that data sets. Experiment #3, we're going to make use of. Those absorbers that I mentioned are included in the basic kit. This is just showing you we took some pictures of a detector setup with the the students are going to are going to be able to figure out the attenuation. Of course, that's the whole idea. Does lead do a different job of attenuating than polyethylene? Of course it does. And they're going to plot out the densities and the attenuations versus the the counts that they get because we've got to you'll you'll position the source on the other side of the attenuators. Experiment #4, Compton scattering. Here we do make use of the table and the scattering pillar. So what's shown here is you have the source inside of its shield with its slit columnator and the detector inside of its shield with its slit columnator. And what the students are going to be doing is they're going to be recording the number of counts that they get at different angles. And we have a little brief video that's going to show that this is the theoretical of what they should see, the energy and the counts. The energy is going to change and the counts are going to change with the angle. This is some experimental data that actually Gabriella and I took when I was up there at the factory. And we'll show you how we got that in a brief video. This is a 4 minute video. I don't intend to let it run the entire 4 minutes because I think everybody will get the idea. But what we did is we we positioned the detector at a certain designation on the table, which represents the angle we acquire a spectrum for a certain amount of time. And we draw a region of interest around that peak. And what we're reading off of the balloon that pops up is what was the centroid energy. And then in an Excel spreadsheet that we created, we're plotting that. Here's the example of moving it to the next angle and repeating. So it's a series of measurements at different angles, recording the energy and the counts. Yeah, we'll do one more. There we go. So hopefully you get the idea. All right, Experiment #5 is the half life measurements. Here we're going to show first of all, we're going to introduce to the students what is the background subtraction and why we do it. But importantly, what we're going to do is we're going to acquire some Spectra with a short lived nuclide. But instead of running in pulse height analysis, pulse height analysis for those of you, I think most of you are familiar with that. But in case you're not, it's where the X axis is number of channels or energy versus counts, multi channel scaling. The X axis is time and in multi channel scaling, we're going to acquire for a certain amount of time which we call it dwell time. We're going to log all of the counts into channel #1 for that dwell time. And when that is expired, we go to channel #2 and we log all the counts in channel #2. So if we had a short lived new glide, we should get less counts in each subsequent channel. And the screen is showing here a very short lived isotope and that's the kind of a curve that you would get. And from looking at the data on that curve, the students will be able to calculate what the half life of that isotope is. So this acquisition mode is called multi channel scaling or MCS. That's the five basic experiments. Now experiments 6 through 12, which are meant to augment the equipment already in the basic kit We're going to, we're going to look at the experiments #6 through 12. What you get in the in the advanced kit is a germanium detector, our broad energy germanium detector. We call it VEGGIE for short broad energy germanium. That means that in our way of thinking that is in a useful energy range of three. Kev up to about 3M EV, so very, very broad energy range. A links to digital spectrum analyzer that's the box that you see here like the Osprey that's device is the multi channel analyzer, digital signal processing, high voltage power supply. The Links is capable of some advanced acquisition modes and we're going to talk about those in a little bit. And it's also suitable if you did want to hook up a sodium iodide or scintillation detector to it. But it has the capability in the number of data channels to easily support support germanium detectors. Also included in the lab kit this concept might be familiar to some of you, maybe not to others is a copy of our LabSOCS software Laboratory Sourceless Object Calibration Software. LabSOCS and its companion I SOCS have been around since the late 90s. Industry has adopted it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved of using mathematical calibrations for efficiency, and that's what it's doing. We're using to use lab socks later on for the students to do mathematical efficiency calibrations. That means you don't have to have a source to do the efficiency calibrations and we'll touch on that a little bit later. Also included in the advanced kit is another sodium iodide detector and a photo multiplier tube base with preamp for that sodium iodide detector. We're including a couple of source holders pictured here. One of them is a fixed 25 centimeters above the detector in cap. The other is an adjustable adjustable source holder so that we can adjust it from, I think contact up to 18 centimeters a second. Calimator and shield for the sodium iodide detector is included and a cable set. So experiment 6 here. The student is going to learn some of the details about what goes on with the signal processing in a digital MCA. We're going to have the students change. For instance, for those of you that are using them and remember analog electronics, you have a Gaussian time shaping constant. Usually it's a knob on the amplifier. And as you've observed, the faster you make the Gaussian shaping, our throughput improves, your dead time goes down, but also your resolution worsens. If you make the Gaussian time shaping longer, the resolution gets better, but we don't have quite the throughput. The students are going to do the same thing here in the digital domain and digitally. We use trapezoid filtering, not Gaussian, so the students are going to adjust what we call the rise time and the flat top of the trapezoid and they're going to see what it effect it has on the spectrum. They'll also get their first taste of using an oscilloscope. You do not need to wheel out an oscilloscope in the lab and bring it over. The links includes a built in digital oscilloscope. What you do to access it is the links has its own web interface. So you go to the address of the links, the IP address of the links in your favorite browser, whether it's Chrome or whatever it is, and you can launch the digital oscilloscope there to look at the pulse process. So that's experiment 6, Experiment 7. This is the time the students first get to play with the germanium detector. What we're stressing in Experiment #7 is to have the students compute resolution and they're going to do it for both the germanium detector and they're going to do it for the sodium iodide detectors. And I think like all of us that have ever seen them side by side, they're going to prefer germanium when they get out out in the real world because of its vastly better energy resolution. Experiment #8. We're going to have the student understand the concept of an efficiency calibration. Why we need to do one. I think as we all know, one of the reasons to to know the efficiency of your detector is so we can ultimately compute activity of isotopes that might be in a sample. That is the end game for a lot of our customers out in the real world, where they use detectors to do quantitative and qualitative analysis of samples and objects. So they will learn to, using sources, measure and calculate the efficiencies both of sodium iodide and the germanium detector and plot them out Experiment #9. This is coincidence counting this in the old days was a little bit more difficult to set up all of your cables etcetera with your NIM electronics and it's much simpler these days. What we're going to do is we're going to take two detectors and we're going to put a source in between and show the students what coincidence means. So one of the ways that we can do this and we have in the past is that you run in pulse site analysis and you run in coincidence mode. By that I mean, let's take the germanium detector for instance. I want to look at the germanium spectrum, but I only want to look at the pulses that hit both the germanium and the sodium iodide detector within a certain time frame. That's the coincidence, and I would set the time frame of let's say 5 microseconds. So any pulse that hits both detectors, I want to see the spectrum for it. With the links, you can see the corrected spectrum, which is the coincidence only, and you can see the raw spectrum. So you can compare them side by side. That's sort of 1 traditional way to do this. What we're going to have the students do in this laboratory in this experiment rather, is that they're going to use an acquisition mode called T list, that's time stamped list mode. So T list is a sequence of numbers that get thrown out to the computer and you have the size of the pulse and then you also have it time stamped so we know exactly what time that pulse came in. The advantage here is that you could later on the student or you could later on you can make your own coincidence determinations. You could say, all right, I want to run a comparison of these two data streams, show me all of the pulses that occurred within 1/2 of a microsecond, for instance. Now do it for three microseconds and you can see the different coincidences that way. So it's very flexible for you to after the fact, make the coincidence decisions and do the analysis. So experiment 9 coincidence, much simpler as I mentioned compared to the Nim days, if you look at the back of our Lynx MCA, you will see one cable going to the back of the Osprey. In our experiment we've got a sodium ion that butted up against the germanium detector. That is that is your gate. You set the gate window when you're using them. This is a little bit tricky because you're running blind. In this experiment, the links using its digital oscilloscope, we can actually set we can align the gate with the peak store pulse. So you can see here's the gate, here's the peak store pulse. You simply move them relative to one another to make sure that we're gating at the right time. Much quicker to set gating experiment 10 is a positron annihilation. What we're trying to get the students to understand is what in the heck are these five elevens and why do you get two of them at 180 degrees opposite? But they're going to understand the the geometrical behavior of positron annihilation by moving the one detector versus the other and plotting out the data that they see. They of course will get far fewer counts as they deviate from 180 degrees opposite experiment, 11 mathematical efficiencies. This is the LabSOCS that I had mentioned earlier. They will because they know how to do a source based efficiency. Now we're going to mathematically model something and we're going to do an efficiency and they're going to verify the results using an actual source and we're going to compare the source based efficiency with the mathematical or LabSOCS efficiency. So the industry since the late 90s has moved away from as much as they can, buying a lot of miss traceable mix gamma calibration standards for every object that they count in, every sample matrix. That gets very expensive and of course it also costs money to maintain and dispose of the sources and they can do it mathematically. They buy far fewer sources and some things are just very difficult to buy a source for. If you have to or if you encounter 55 gallon drums half full of oil it it makes no sense that you would buy a mixed gamma in this traceable standard in that geometry. We can easily do it mathematically. Same thing if customers are pointing detectors at pipes, stacks where you have an exhaust stack of a facility. Very simple for us to do very detailed accurate efficiency calibrations mathematically. So here the students going to learn that skill experiment #12 is true. Coincidence coming Summing. They will understand what causes coincidence summing and what its consequences are and where. We do this with the adjustable source holder. We're going to go very close and then move it far away and they're going to observe the effects on both the count rate and the spectral results. Both of these experiments on 1111 and 12 make use of the mathematical modeling. What is it? Our geometry composer allows them to define what object do they want to count. And here you can see a small container like cottage cheese can maybe half filled of the liquid. That's the source. We also, it's sort of a lighthearted thing. We show a wine glass sitting on top of the detector. The point we're trying to make here is you can model any object as long as it's symmetric about 1 axis and a wine glass is. And here's a real world example of because this does happen with a lot of our customers, they take a portable detector out in the field and they point it at some sort of a right circular cylinder like a 55 gallon drum. So they compose the geometry and from that we can calculate the efficiency. And lab socks also gives them the tools to correct for those summing effects that they learned in Experiment #12. Okay, Why digital MC A's. Why did we do that? MC A's back in the days were standalone boxes. They were expensive, they were big, they were heavy, etcetera. Personal computers came along and we put MCA cards in the bus of the computer. But this was still all analog. We have evolved to using digital for a a lot of reasons. Here are some of them. First of all, they're much smaller. Very few labs have a ton of free space. Space is always at a premium, so the smaller the equipment, the better. We use far, far less power than we did back in the days. Those of you using them electronics at the moment, you know how much power they suck up. They do emit an awful lot of heat, which is great if it's the middle of winter and the lab is cold, but other than that it's not so great. Cabling is much simpler. The setup is is much simpler. The cabling is simpler. The idea is let's spend less time on hardware set up. Let's get the experiments running. Then the students have more time to work on the scientific concepts that we're trying to teach. I mentioned this before, All the MCA settings are stored with the spectrum. That just wasn't possible in the days of Nim Electronics. The student would have to write down what every knob and switch setting was on the Nim. Here, they don't have to worry about it. It's stored with the spectrum. I mentioned before that the spectrum, excuse me, the MC A's, the Osprey and the links can be accessed remotely if your IT rules at your facility allow. Because the links in the Osprey presumably you would put on a network. The students can get to that network from their dorm room or their apartment. We picked the links too because it has a digital oscilloscope built in for the reasons I mentioned before. We don't have to want to wheel out or or purchase in a separate oscilloscope just to look at the pulses. I didn't mention this before, but we're all familiar with the single channel analyzer. That is you set a discriminator in your amplifier, a lower level and an upper level discriminator and typically you would do this to bracket. I just want to look at the counts around a certain range, let's say for CZM 137. Well the links in the Osprey each include eight single channel analyzers built into them. So you have eight of those available to you. So you could actually set up different windows, different energy windows for sources that you're putting in front of it in the detector and you can look at a time histogram of the counts very useful single channel analyzers having multiple. And the other reason to go with digital MC A's is we do have beyond just the typical pulse site analysis and multi channel scaling. We have some advanced acquisition modes and two of them that are using experiment number six are the single channel analyzer mode and this concept of multispectral scaling. So multispectral scaling is we're going to do typically a relatively short pulse height analysis and then I want to, I want to immediately then start acquiring in the second memory group of my MCA, whether it's an Osprey or a Links. While I'm acquiring in that second memory group, we're going to store the first memory group. So we're ping ponging between the two memory groups with virtually no dead time in between, right. Why would I want to do that? Some of our systems that we sell, for instance, we have a product called the data analyst which serves markets where you have a transient source like you have a stack monitor. We have a detector pointed at a stack and the sample, the nucleus are flowing past the detector. It can be pointed at a pipe where you have liquid in a pipe and once again the source is flowing past the Spectra. So what we can do is we can set up these acquisition times to be very short, let's say 1/2 of a second, two minutes, 5 minutes, whatever you desire. And what we're going to be able to do is plot out activity of individual isotopes over time, so we know exactly what's flown past our detector. To do that, we take advantage of multispectral scaling MSS for sure. I hit on a little bit. The other one that we use in in experiments 9 and 10 is this concept of list mode, where each pulsite analysis of that, it's stored as a digital value and in timestamp list mode or T list mode we attach a time to that digital value. You can then replay this in your own software, your own spreadsheet, whatever you want to do, you can replay that to make sense of the data that you've gotten. Certainly very useful in coincidence county. All right. This was designed to give you a chuckle. Many of you probably have seen that this is real, by the way. We didn't just have Gabriella and I connect a bunch of cables up, but this is a real experiment, looks kind of complicated. We we can simplify things. This is another one that basically every facility that I've been to seems to have one of these store rooms which has electronics from the 50s, sixties and 70s that just don't seem to go away. We we can, we can clean that up a little bit. We believe it is time to go from this kind of a setup which was state-of-the-art a while ago. You have your sodium iodide detector in an M bin. We've got a high voltage module. We have an amplifier, single channel analyzer that feeds a counter timer that feeds a rate meter. We can go from that to that with $1.00. All right. I would like to discuss and show you a testimonial, which we have on video from a customer at the University of Liverpool. They have a central teaching laboratory. CTL is what they call it. And by way of example, these are the different students, the different curriculum that take advantage of the lab kits that are in the central teaching lab. And you can see pictures of it here in the background. They have multiple stations throughout, but it's everything from geography to physics to medical physics. They also do research projects there. These are the type of students that they can attract simply by just having the right set of equipment. Doctor Andy Boston from University of Liverpool When I I'm going to kick off the video of him describing how he has implemented the lab kits and digital Mca's at Liverpool in the CTL. We have a range of different, yeah, pardon me at Liverpool and the CTL we have a range of different gamma ray detector equipment and some neutron detector equipment that we use. So the systems are based on sodium iodide detectors and germanium detectors for gamma ray detection. And then for the neutron detector we use helium 3 detectors and Boron Troi fluoride detectors. That's when they've us to read out all the detectors. We use a set of different digital solutions. So for the scintillators, we're using the the standard Osprey system which is connected to the network through Power of Ethernet, which is a very flexible way of operating the systems. And for the germanium and neutral detector systems, we're using the links box. And the link systems enable us to be able to also interface through remote connections to the detectors and monitor their performance over a long period of time. Yeah. So previously all of the systems we used were based on analog systems which were connected to nuclear instrumentation crates and limb crates. And the performance of those systems was limited because we were unable to do long term monitoring of the equipment. And we found that due to temperature variations in the laboratory, we had stability issues with all the detector systems, which meant that, for example, we would have to calibrate the systems in the morning and in the afternoon, which if you're doing a teaching lab was is odorous. Both for the student experience and and for the academic staff and postgraduate students demonstrating. So we moved to digital systems, and the advantage of those systems was that they were much more stable as a function of time. Which meant, for example, that a calibration you did on a Monday would work both for the whole week you're operating, but for subsequent many weeks afterwards without any changes being required. Unless of course you change the detector operating parameters. But also the digital system enabled us to enable higher count rate operation of the detectors without having to worry about dead time issues. So that meant that students could predictably understand the efficiency of the response of those detectors without having to do count rate corrections, which was very useful for applications where we're counting gamma ray sources in close proximity. So those two things together were the main reasons for looking to use the digital systems as well as the opportunity really to make measurements with remote connections to the detector system. So being able to connect to the system, whether you're in the laboratory or whether you're in your office or from home or wherever location you are, enabled us to continuously monitor the detector systems. Now for teaching, it's quite important to do a demonstration of good practice. And so students who are doing things correctly or incorrectly on a digital system, we're able to show all of their screens at the same time on a projector to illustrate where there's good measurement practice or whether there's something that's not working in a way that we would hope. So I think you know the combination of the stability which enables the learning experience to be improved, the ability to demonstrate how the detectors work to all students in the lab as well as those who are remotely accessing the equipment and finally to, you know, enable the system to be reliable over a long period of time has been our our main reason for using this equipment. So during COVID, obviously we lost access to the laboratory. So undergraduate students and postgraduate students couldn't access the facility and we still had to deliver our training, which was necessary for the degree programs the students were on. And so the Radiation Laboratory was able to continue running because all of our equipment was available for access remotely. So we're enabling this by having a technician and an academic in the laboratory. You could place the radioactive sources in front of the detectors, but the students could connect remotely. So that enabled them to access the detectors from home or wherever they were. They could do the experiment because they could take the data through the software and they could analyze the data through the appropriate software. And so they still felt they were able to get the full learning experience. Obviously there was camera set up so the students could see the equipment, but not being there physically, they could still fully engage with the equipment. So an example would be if we're taking a germanium detector, they could access the germanium detector through the links box, They could record the data from the germanium detector through the links box, then analyze the Spectra in the usual way. And the same was true with the Osprey basis, which were connected to the sodium iodide detectors. They will enable us to connect properly to the detectors and operate them in exactly the way you could in the physical environment. And that's something that's been very useful because that has enabled us subsequent to COVID to be able to operate hybrid training courses with our students there in person and students who can access and run the equipment remotely. So the learning experience although slightly different, it's still enabling those who are attending these units or modules to be able to use the equipment in a in a way which gains the best understanding from that equipment. OK, hope you enjoyed that testimonial from Dr. Andy Boston. We do have a final poll question for you. Would you utilize remote lab experiments? I'm going to pause here and please respond if you can. We're curious as to whether you think that that is a worthwhile feature. So I'm going to pause for 30 seconds or so while you respond. Okay, thank you for that. We've got about 60% of you have responded. Appreciate your feedback on that. Okay to summarize before we get to the questions and answers. We believe that these lab kits can serve as the baseline for you as the instructor for the experiments. It's a good representation with the 12 experiments we have in there. Obviously feel free to insert any that you feel are more appropriate or that you want to cover in your curriculum and don't use the ones that you do not believe apply as well. But you have the flexibility to do that. You can add other experiments, a high level experiments because you have state-of-the-art germanium detector, the links, the osprey. If you can think of it, you can probably do it with this, with this series of equipment. Very importantly, we believe the lab manual covers a lot of what you're going to need to do. The step by step guides for the students are very easy to read and we provide it. You have the equipment list, so you know exactly what to take out the storeroom etcetera. And importantly the students are going to learn on this equipment and it's what they're going to see when they get out of school and they work in the in industry. I I didn't enjoy the in in when I was in college we had this ancient stuff that that we used in the laboratory and then I went out in the real world and I didn't, I didn't recognize anything because it was all new and modern. Here it is new and modern. This is what they will see. We talked about it but you can the students can participate remotely if you want them to. This is of course what Andy pointed out with COVID and they were forced to and they did it to great effect. So thank you very much for attending today. That includes my presentation. I apologize if it was rather quick. As Hope mentioned at the beginning of this, this webinar has been recorded and it will post on our website in the next day or two as you can see the you can also see the previous webinars that we've done on the on different topics. So this one will be there also. So thank you very much. Contact us if you need any, a further dive into the software, into the specifics of the experiments etcetera. We will be happy to get back to you quickly. One final poll question and then I'm going to get to the questions that have been typed in. Are you interested in upgrading to digital electronics? Yes, I'm interested, but not not ready for a quote today. I'm a current LabSOCS user and I saw from the attendees, excuse me, I said LabSOCS, I'm a current lab kit user. I've noticed from the attendees, we do have some customers that already have lab kits that are in attendance today And then the final one would be no thanks. So if you could respond to that, we'd appreciate it. So while you do that, I'm going to look at some of the questions that have come up. Is prospect Windows 11 compatible? Yes, we have tested it. Gabrielle is running it on Windows, her Windows 11 computer in her office today. So yes, is it possible to purchase the software in manual without the detectors, etcetera? Yes it is. Ask your local representative or account manager to get you a quote on that. We can certainly do it. What source is used for the Positron annihilation experiment and what is its activity? That source is the sodium 22 source. One micro carry. One question, do we have to use a high efficiency germanium detector while we work with the source? Could we use lower efficiency? Yes. We chose the Broad energy germanium detector because of the three Kev to 3M EV energy range. The Veggie detector we sell in different sizes. We could supply a different size to go higher or lower efficiency. That translates into a bigger or a smaller crystal. So yes, we can be flexible on that. I didn't point it out at the appropriate slide on the advanced kit as to what you get with it. But if you'll notice I show that the Veggie detector as part of our standard offering includes a 30 liter Dewar. For the detector cooling germanium detectors need to run at cryogenic temperatures. We offer other cooling, lot of customers take advantage of this. We have all electrical cooling with our Cryopulse 5 electrical cooler. We also have a hybrid cooler which is called the Intelligent Cryocycle. It's basically a 22 liter dewer that has a condenser on the top of it and we we reliquefy the boil off nitrogen gas and put it into the dewer. So as long as you have a A/C power, we can reliquefy that Ln. So instead of refilling the dewer every week or week and a half, you're going to top off that dewer every year and a half to two years. So much less labor is spent on filling dewers. So the point is, ulterior, excuse me, alternate coolers are available for the germanity detector. You can get it configured that way. Do we have detailed videos on the. I think this this means the individual 12 experiments. No, we do not. We did a we did a I did a a brief shallow dive on the experiments today, but not the detailed videos. I I think we did it for experiment #4 to kind of show you how you could move the source around on the scattering pillar then take data in prospect and then I was typing it into an Excel spreadsheet to create the curve. Do we have any training for Pips detectors? Not sure, no. We we do not have anything called out for instance in experiments for instance on alpha spectroscopy. So nothing there per se. Not hard to envision someone coming up with an experiment for those, but not included in the basic or advanced lab kits where we hit for just gamma work. Okay, what additional sources do I need to buy? And in the manual I mentioned there is a matrix at the beginning of what sources you should have on hand. We provide the 1/2 millicury season 137 source. In addition, we suggest that you get a moderately sized meaning, like a micro Curie Season 137, sodium 22, Cobalt 57, cobalt 60, yttrium 88 and europium 152. Those are suggested because those are called out in the experiments. Why is there not an osprey included with the advance kit for doing experiment #10 we could have? We wanted to keep the cost down on the advance kit. Experiment #10 is the Positron annihilation, where you have the two sodium iodides facing each other. We could have put in the advance get a second osprey, but because we already had the links, we chose to put the 2007 P for the multiplier tube base with it. So you're using the osprey and the links. Is the MC A's for the 2M C A's to do coincidence on the positive trial annihilation. Okay, I think that does it for the questions. In fact, we might even be a little bit early. So anybody has any additional questions, please get them in now before we wrap up Okay. All right. Well, if there's no further questions, if there was something that was typed in, in the questions that I have missed or glossed over, we will get you answers in writing in the next day or two. We have a record of those. So we'll make sure that I gave you the correct answer, but we'll get it to you in writing. So it's a complete followup. Thank you all for pretending. I appreciate it very much. Hope do I turn it over to you now. I will end it. All righty. _1733246994935