A Cs2LiYCl6:Ce-based advanced radiation monitoring device

Cs2LiYCl6:Ce3+ (CLYC) scintillator has gained recent interest because of its ability to perform simultaneous gamma spectroscopy and thermal neutron detection. Discrimination between the two incident particle types owes to the fundamentally unique emission waveforms, a consequence of the interaction and subsequent scintillation mechanisms within the crystal. Due to this dual-mode detector capability, CLYC was selected for the development of an Advanced Radiation Monitoring Device (ARMD), a compact handheld instrument for radioisotope identification and localization. ARMD consists of four 1 in.-right cylindrical CLYC crystals, custom readout electronics including a suitable multi-window application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), battery pack, proprietary software, and Android-based tablet for high-level analysis and display. We herein describe the motivation of the work and engineering design of the unit, and we explain the software embedded in the core module and for radioisotope analysis. We report an operational range of tens of keV to 8.5 MeV with approximately 5.3% gamma energy resolution at 662 keV, thermal neutron detection efficiency of 10%, battery lifetime of up to 10 h, manageable rates of 20 kHz; further, we describe in greater detail time to identify specific gamma source setups.