RALPH B. JAMES, Program Co-Chair. Brookhaven National Laboratory. PAUL SIFFERT, Program Co-Chair. Phase-CNRS. 0018-9499/02$17.00 © 2002 IEEE.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 49, NO. 3, JUNE 2002
845
Foreword: A Message From the RTSD Cochairs
T
HE Twelfth International Workshop on Room-Temperature Semiconductor X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Detectors (RTSD) was held on November 5–9, 2001. The RTSD workshop was a continuation of a series of meetings devoted to the subject, the last five taking place in Vienna (1999), Boston (1997), Grenoble (1995), San Francisco (1993), and Ravello (1991). This was the first time that the workshop was held in conjunction with the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium (NSS) and Medical Imaging Conference (MIC). All of the 101 oral and poster RTSD presentations were conducted in the same complex of buildings as the NSS and MIC to facilitate information exchange between the participants. Joint sessions with NSS and MIC were also held to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas. Although the number of attendees varied with the session and day of week, the conference attendance averaged approximately 120 people, with a substantial fraction of those in attendance representing organizations outside of the United States. Some of the sessions drew more than 250 attendees. The workshop was organized into technical sessions on cadmium zinc telluride, cadmium telluride, silicon, mercuric iodide, lead iodide, gallium arsenide, thallium bromide, imaging applications, simulations, and electronics. The purpose was to provide a forum for scientists and engineers from the room-temperature semiconductor detector development and user communities to present and evaluate the most recent results on X- and gamma-ray detectors and to discuss the requirements for a variety of radiation-sensing and imaging applications. The primary theme of the workshop was development of improved semiconductor detectors and imaging arrays, which combine the advantages of room-temperature operation with the ability to
spectrally resolve the energies of emitted X- and gamma-rays. By eliminating the cryogen, new radiation-sensing instruments, such as spectrometers and gamma-ray cameras, can be manufactured that are portable, lightweight, easy to operate, and relatively maintenance-free. Recent research and development on these detectors have resulted in significant progress in the availability of single detectors and imaging arrays. Despite the limitations on efficiency of current room-temperature semiconductor detectors, they have been increasingly deployed in systems useful for medical diagnostics, space applications, safeguarding of nuclear materials, X-ray fluorescence, position sensing, and gamma-ray spectroscopy. Although significant progress has occurred over recent years, there is still a pressing need to lower the cost of the detectors and increase the efficiency of room-temperature semiconductor detectors without degrading their spectral performance. The RTSD proceedings provide detailed documentation describing many of the conference presentations. The program chairs hope that it will serve as an important record of the workshop, provide an update on the status of the technology, and serve as a useful source of information for those working in the field. The program chairs would like to thank the session chairs and members of the Assistant Chairs Program Committee, who offered their time to enlist the involvement of most researchers working in the field.
RALPH B. JAMES, Program Co-Chair Brookhaven National Laboratory PAUL SIFFERT, Program Co-Chair Phase-CNRS
Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9499(02)06324-4.
0018-9499/02$17.00 © 2002 IEEE
