Mondal Prasanna Kumar, Sarkar Rupa, Chatterjee Barun Kumar
Department of Physics, Bose Institute, 93/1 A.P.C. Road, Kolkata 700009, India.
Appl Radiat Isot. 2014 Aug;90:1-7. doi: 10.1016/j.apradiso.2014.02.024. Epub 2014 Mar 12.
R-134a (C2H2F4) is a low cost, easily available and chlorine free refrigerant, which in its superheated state can be used as an efficient neutron detector. Due to its high solubility in water the R-134a based superheated droplet detectors (SDD) are usually very unstable unless the detector is fabricated using a suitable additive, which stabilizes the detector. The SDD is known to have superheated droplets distributed in a short-lived and in a relatively long-lived metastable states. We have studied the detector response to neutrons using a (241)AmBe neutron source and obtained the temperature variation of the nucleation parameters and the interstate kinetics of these droplets using a two-state model.
