Award Data

We propose to develop Prediction of Emergent SCIENce & Technology (PRESCIENT), a system that mines a text corpus of scientific patents and publications to discover emerging technologies that may impact WMD or CWMD. PRESCIENT will take as input patents and

Infrasound and seismic measurements are used by DTRA and the DoD for nuclear test monitoring, terrorist blast forensics, battle damage assessment, and environmental monitoring. However, these long wavelength physical signals are typically recorded through single-point sensors or sparse low density arrays. As a result, the critical signals of interest are often corrupted or masked by noise or inter ...

A significant performance gap exists between the theoretical number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPS) that a HPC machine is capable of sustaining and the number of FLOPS realized by real-world HPC applications. One of the principle reasons for this gap is the parasitic work that computational processes must do to communicate with one another. It has been shown that this communication work can b ...

The goal of the project is to develop a handheld instrument that detects, identifies, and categorizes radioactive sources based on gamma, thermal-, and fast-neutron signatures. Existing radioisotope identification devices (RIIDs) are typically biased toward gamma spectroscopy; some instruments may use an additional inefficient neutron counter in form of a He-3 tube. The recent development of mat ...

Gamma radiation detection has traditionally required single crystal materials that are difficult to produce consistently on an industrial scale. Agiltron has developed a new class of scintillator materials based on composites containing nanoparticles. These so-called nanocomposites exhibit radiation detection characteristics superior to currently available single crystal scintillators. In Phase I ...

Standoff detection of nuclear materials continues to be one of the most critical tasks that security specialists must confront in a wide variety of applications, both military and civilian. There have been several approaches for standoff nuclear material detection. Each of them utilizes a different fundamental property of nuclear materials to improve the sensitivity of detection. In this SBIR prog ...

Certain lanthanide halides have significantly higher light output than NaI:Tl, the comparison standard for scintillators, plus other important properties, including fast decay times and excellent proportionality. Unfortunately, lanthanide halides grown by traditional melt processes have high production costs and limited availability. Crystals are usually limited to about 5x5 cm2, right cylinder, ...

High-resolution scintillation crystals and crystal arrays are important components of current and future handheld and arrayed detectors (used for DOD/DTRA applications), and scintillation spectrometers (routinely used in high energy physics research, medical imaging, diffraction, homeland security, nuclear waste clean-up, nuclear treaty verification and safeguards, and geological exploration). Un ...

Analysis of nuclear material samples in the field has many advantages over laboratory analysis. Laboratory analyses can be slow, involve increased expense, lead to additional waste generation and disposal problems, and may introduce errors due to sample degradation or mishandling. In situ analysis mitigates all of these problems. The specific aim of this project is the development of a truly por ...

Until now gamma radiation detection has required large single crystals of sensitive materials that are difficult to produce consistently on an industrial scale. In collaboration with a research group at the University of Texas at Arlington, Agiltron proposes to develop a new class of nanocomposite scintillator materials. The radiation detection characteristics of the synthetic nanoparticles in the ...