CERN@school: Attenuation of Radiation sample dataset

This dataset was obtained by A. Coupe (SEPnet intern, CERN@school) with a Timepix hybrid silicon detector as part of an experiment to measure the attenuation of beta particles from Strontium-90 by sheets of aluminium with varying thicknesses. The experiment and its results are described in (Whyntie et al. 2015).

The detector settings can be found in accompanying .dsc files. The distance from source to detector was 9.3 cm, the distance from source to aluminium was 4.0 cm.

Inside the zip file, the data for each thickness of aluminium is saved in a file with the thickness as its folder name.

Data is stored in dataXXX.txt files in X,Y,C format, where X is the x-co-ordinate of the hit pixel in the Timepix detector's 256x256 pixel silicon sensor element, Y is the y-co-ordinate of the pixel, and C is the number of counts recorded in the pixel.

The counts recorded is equivalent to the charge deposited in the pixel about a predetermined threshold value. The detector is run in Time-Over-Threshold (ToT) mode, where it measures the charge for the amount of time it is above the threshold value.

Code for analysing the data can be found at the GitHub repository listed below.

This work was supported by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) via grant numbers ST/J000256/1 and ST/N00101X/1, as well as a Special Award from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.  The authors wish to thank SEPnet for supporting A. Coupe's summer internship with CERN@school.

References

Whyntie, T. et al. "CERN@school: demonstrating physics with the Timepix detector", Contemporary Physics doi:10.1080/00107514.2015.1045193 (2015)