Detecting incident angles of radioactive particles with the Timepix 3 detector

My University final year project was “Detecting incident angles of radioactive particles with the Timepix 3 detector”, as I had experience with using Timepix detectors for a few years by then, and I thought this could be a useful project for future research in this area.

The project overall had a negative outcome - I was not able to determine incident angles with a single detector. You can download the full report here.

The full abstract:

This project uses the Timpix 3 radiation detector, a 256x256 pixel hybrid silicon pixel detector, which can capture frames of ionising radiation incident on the detector surface. The detector simultaneously captures Time of Arrival (ToA) (the time during a capture when a pixel was triggered) and Time over Threshold (ToT) (providing information to get the evergy deposited on a pixel) information which was thought may be able to be used to calculate the incident angle of a radioactive particle.

It was additionally theorised that the ToA information could be used to improve the current clustering algorithm used by some institutions for other detectors in the Timepix family. Data was collected across the country with the detector, which proved very useful for the improved clustering algorithm that was developed. An average time difference for all clusters detected was taken and used to sepa rate clusters both by time and space (as previously they were separated by just space). This allows for more accurate particle classification. We have also shown that a single detector cannot be used in a static position to identify incident angles for most incident particles due to their energy, size and the speed at which they travel. Hence in a reasonable experimental setup, multiple detectors would be required to determine this.