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A scintillation counter is an instrument for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation by using the excitation effect of incident radiation on a scintillator material, and detecting the resultant light pulses. It consists of a scintillator which generates photons in response to incident radiation, a sensitive photomultiplier tube which converts the light to an electrical signal and electronics to process this signal. Scintillation counters are widely used in radiation protection, assay of radioactive materials and physics research because they can be made inexpensively yet with good quantum efficiency, and can measure both the intensity and the energy of incident radiation. ==History== The modern electronic scintillation counter was invented in 1944 by Sir Samuel Curran〔("Counting tubes, theory and applications", Curran, Samuel C., Academic Press (New York), 1949 )〕〔(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography )〕 whilst he was working on the Manhattan Project at the University of California at Berkeley. There was a requirement to measure the radiation from small quantities of uranium and his innovation was to use one of the newly-available highly sensitive PMT tubes made by the Radio Corporation of America to accurately count the flashes of light from a scintillator subjected to radiation. This built upon the work of earlier researchers such as Antoine Henri Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity whilst working on the phosphorescence of uranium salts in 1896. Previously scintillation events had to be laboriously detected by eye using a spinthariscope which was a simple microscope to observe light flashes in the scintillator. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「scintillation counter」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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