Handbook of Radiation Effects

This handbook is intended to serve as a tool for designers of equipment and scientific instruments in cases where they are required to ensure the survival of the equipment in radiation environments. High-technology materials, especially semiconductors and optics, tend to degrade on exposure to radiation in many different ways. Intense high-energy radiation environments are found in nuclear reactors and accelerators, machines for radiation therapy, industrial sterilization, and space. Some engineers have to build equipment which will survive a nuclear explosion from a hostile source. Proper handling of a disaster with radioactive materials requires equipment which depends utterly on semiconductor microelectronics and imaging devices. Thus the technology of radiation-tolerant electronics is an instrument for good social spheres as diverse as disaster planning and the exploration of Mars. In order to design equipment for intense environments like those described above, then degradation from high-energy irradiation must be seen as a basic design parameter. The aim of this handbook is to assist the engineer or student in that thought; to make it possible to write intelligent specifications; to offer some understanding of the complex variety of effects which occur when high-technology components encounter high-energy radiation; and to go thoroughly into the balance ofmore » choices of how to alleviate the effects and hence achieve the design aims of the project. Separate abstracts were prepared for 15 chapters of this book.« less