Researchers in the Nuclear Detection field have available to them lab and office space at UT in the Ferris Hall, SERF, and coming soon JIAM buildings.  In the Ferris lab, we have a host of gamma, neutron, and alpha sources; bench top-level radiation sensor and optical components; single and multichannel nuclear electronic modules; data acquisition electronics; oscilloscopes; and high-performance multicore workstations for data acquisition, processing, and simulations.

Highlights include:

• Many channels of 2 GHz bandwidth, 8 GSa/s, 10 bit digitizers for fast timing measurements
• Multichannel VME data acquisition system for shaping, time pickoff, and energy pickoff
• Multichannel digitizer and firmware shapers for high energy resolution semiconductor detector readout
• Philips digital silicon photomultiplier evaluation kit, including coincidence circuitry
• Intensified Charge Coupled Device with optical lens for very high resolution neutron radiography
• Fast pulse Picoquant laser (70 ps, 375 nm)  for characterization of fast photosensors
• Multicore workstation for running ZEMAX optical transport software
• Two microchannel plate photomultiplier tube arrays and many high speed 2″ and 1″ photomultiplier tubes

Other Facilities include

• The UT Scintillation Materials Research Center, including a 24 zone furnace for crystal growth that belongs to us
• UT Thin Film Deposition and Processing Facility
• Facilities at the ORNL Center for Radiation Detection Materials and Systems, including furnaces for glass fabrication and equipment for characterizing optical and physical properties of glasses
• Laboratory facilities and equipment of the ORNL Nuclear Security and Isotope Technology Division, including
  • A proof-of-concept dual neutron and gamma ray imaging trailer system, called Dual Detection-Localization-Imaging (DLI), consisting of large volumes of NaI detectors and organic scintillators built into a coded aperture imaging array
  • Access to Associated Particle Imaging (API) Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) neutron generators and Cf-252 ionization chambers
  • Access to the Nuclear Materials Identification Systems (NMIS), including laboratory and fieldable versions
  • A neutron measurements background trailer, equipped with a large volume of liquid scintillator and weather station
  • Portable neutron coded aperture imaging systems (Paul Hausladen, PI)
  • Gamma ray coded aperture imaging systems (Klaus Ziock, PI)
  • Access to a safeguards laboratory where uranium standards are stored
  • Access to a portal monitoring facility
• Neutron science beamlines at the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Spallation Neutron Source (and associated development and testing laboratories)
• Linear accelerators at the Idaho Accelerator Center; incidentally, a new Linac facility is planned for our new UTK engineering complex

Micro-Processing Research Facility

The Mirco-Processing Research Facility at the University of Tennessee is a UT Core Facility and housed within the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials (JIAM). The Micro-Processing Research Facility (MPRF) provides researchers the ability to conduct micro-processing fabrication processes. Services include optical lithography, thin film deposition, capacitively coupled reactive ion etching, and silicon-based plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition processes. This equipment is housed in a class 100 clean room with all necessary facilities and supporting process equipment. In combination with other JIAM facilities, the MPRF provides researchers with the means to conduct cutting-edge investigations in materials science and engineering. The Director of the MPRF is Eric Lukosi, and further information about the MPRF can be found here.