LET dependence of bubbles evaporation pulses in superheated emulsion detectors

Superheated emulsion detectors are suspensions of metastable liquid droplets in a compliant inert medium. Upon interaction with ionizing radiation, the droplets evaporate, generating visible bubbles. Bubble expansion associated with the boiling of the droplets is accompanied by pressure pulses in both the sonic and ultrasonic frequency range. In this work, we analyzed the signal generated by bubble evaporation in the frequency and time domain. We used octafluoropropane (R-218) based emulsions, sensitive to both photons and neutrons. The frequency content of the detected pulses appears to extend well into the hundreds of kHz, beyond the range used in commercial devices to count bubbles as they are formed (typically 1–10 kHz). Kilohertz components characterize the early part of the waveforms, potentially containing information about the energetics of the explosive bubble initial growth phase. The power spectral density of the acoustic signal produced by neutron-induced evaporation shows a characteristic frequency pattern in the 200–400 kHz range, which is not observed when bubbles evaporate upon gamma ray-induced irradiation. For practical applications, detection of ultrasonic pulses associated with the boiling of the superheated drops can be exploited as a fast readout method, negligibly affected by mechanical ambient noise.