ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Degree Program

A.B.

Year of Graduation

2022

Faculty Advisor

Jifeng Liu

Document Type

Thesis (Senior Honors)

Publication Date

Spring 6-7-2022

Abstract

State-of-the-art X-ray detectors either use silicon direct detection—which is inefficient, as silicon is mostly transparent to high-energy X-rays—or rely on expensive scintillators to first down-convert X-ray photons to lower energies. Dr. Eldred Lee of Dartmouth College recently completed doctoral research that suggested the promise of a novel alternative: silicon-based X-ray detectors that utilize photon attenuation layers rather than scintillators. While Dr. Lee’s work is certainly rigorous and meritorious, background noise controls were rendered less effective by circumstances. The work presented in this thesis succeeded in implementing much better background noise controls for a series of new tests to compare the efficiencies of photon attenuation layer-based and scintillator-based X-ray detection methods. New data processing algorithms were designed and implemented which, combined with the better experimental controls, allowed for the identification of individual X-ray detection events. These improvements ultimately produced experimental results that supported Dr. Lee’s findings and showed photon attenuation layer-based X-ray detection methods are much more efficient than state-of-the-art scintillator-based methods.

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