NEW DEVELOPMENTS AND APPLICATIONS OF SUPERHEATED EMULSIONS: WARHEAD VERIFICATION AND SPECIAL NUCLEAR MATERIAL INTERDICTION

In recent years, neutron detection with superheated emulsions has received renewed attention thanks to improved detector manufacturing and read-out techniques, and thanks to successful applications in warhead verification and special nuclear material (SNM) interdiction. Detectors are currently manufactured with methods allowing high uniformity of the drop sizes, which in turn allows the use of optical read-out techniques based on dynamic light scattering. Small detector cartridges arranged in 2D matrices are developed for the verification of a declared warhead without revealing its design. For this application, the enabling features of the emulsions are that bubbles formed at different times cannot be distinguished from each other, while the passive nature of the detectors avoids the susceptibility to electronic snooping and tampering. Large modules of emulsions are developed to detect the presence of shielded special nuclear materials hidden in cargo containers ‘interrogated’ with high energy X-rays. In this case, the enabling features of the emulsions are photon discrimination, a neutron detection threshold close to 3 MeV and a rate-insensitive read-out