[en] The Inner Tracker of the HERA-B experiment at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron is a position-sensitive detector which has to cope with a particle flux up to 2x10⁴ MIPs mm^-2 s^-1 and a radiation dose up to 1 Mrad/year (10 kGy/year). The system consists of Microstrip-Gas-Chambers using a Gas Electron Multiplier as preamplifier structure in the gas volume. During the R and D phase, long-term aging measurements with X-rays were performed to study which electrode material and counting gas do not lead to aging of the detector over long running periods

No abstract available

[en] We present a digital signal processing system based on a photon counting approach which we developed for a thermal neutron detector consisting of ZnS(Ag):"6LiF scintillating layers read out with WLS fibers and SiPMs. Three digital filters have been evaluated: a moving sum, a moving sum after differentiation and a digital CR-RC"4 filter. The performances of the detector with these filters are presented. A full analog signal processing using a CR-RC"4 filter has been emulated digitally. The detector performance obtained with this analog approach is compared with the one obtained with the best performing digital approach. - Highlights: • Application of digital signal processing for a SiPM-based ZnS:6LiF neutron detector. • Optimisation of detector performances with 3 different digital filters. • Comparison with detector performances with a full analog signal processing.

[en] The ep-collider HERA at DESY and the high energy physics experiment H1 were upgraded in the years 2000-2002. A specific luminosity three times higher than before has recently been observed. To cope with the higher luminosity and the more complex background situation a set of five new cylindrical multiwire proportional chambers (CIP2k) were built providing information to distinguish between beam-gas induced background events and true ep-interactions within 2.3 microseconds on a first level trigger stage using all channels of the chambers. The five cylindrical chambers with a cathode pad readout have each a 16 fold segmentation of the azimuth angle and a segmentation of about 120 in z along the beam axis. The total number of readout channels amounts to 9600. Groups of 60 cathode pads are read out via striplines by a custom designed readout chip (CIPix). The on-chamber electronics digitizes and multiplexes the data and sends it via optical links to the trigger and data acquisition system at a rate of about 10 GBit/s per optical link. A histogram of the vertex distribution along the beam axis of the tracks crossing the chamber is calculated by the trigger system. From this histogram trigger informations are derived dividing the histogram in regions of background and physics events. The tracking algorithm is based on bit pattern comparison of pad data. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) were chosen to accomplish this complex and highly parallelized task. In addition the FPGAs contain pipelines to store the chamber data making it possible to read out the information if a trigger occurs. The trigger, data acquisition and high voltage system are controlled and monitored by the experiment control system (ECS) based on commercial software called PVSSII

[en] A new promising perspective in nuclear medicine is the use of radiolabeled antisense oligonucleotides as diagnostic markers. Especially for cancer diagnostics, a quantitative accumulation of antisense probes which are directed against abundantly expressed oncogene mRNAs seems to be reasonable. However, the development of this strategy still requires an optimization of several parameters: (i) Rapid and efficient radiolabeling methods, (ii) a fast penetration of the probe into the target tissue, (iii) a fast internalization into the tumor cell, (iv) an oligonucleotide/mRNA hybrid formation with high specificity, and (v) a high stability of the hybrid against intracellular nucleases. (orig.)

No abstract available

[en] In this work we revisit the problem of the restricted count rate capability of thermal neutron detectors utilizing the ZnS scintillator. The effect of the long afterglow of the scintillator on the detector performance at high counting rates is studied. A count rate capability substantially above values currently regarded as feasible is demonstrated.

[en] Steam turbines form an important part of any power plant. They perform the task of generating electric power by using the steam pressure generated by the reactor itself. The paper discusses the industrial automation used in steam turbine governing systems and shows possible exemplary attacks on such systems. When an attack or an error is detected, it is necessary to reconstruct events leading to the symptom. This might be an integral part of the contingency plan and to reduce further threats. Investigations might be needed to prove liability or innocence of the involved parties. Especially in the latter case it is necessary that such a reconstruction adheres to scientific and well-proven principles. These principles are used to form a forensic process. The paper discusses the possibilities of a forensic investigation performed on steam turbine governing system in order to reconstruct the course of events that led to an incident. To achieve this, the paper identifies the various data streams available in the digital part of steam turbine governing systems as well as the means to gather and analyze these. The paper uses the simulation of a steam turbine system as a foundation and discusses potential traces and means to protect the integrity and authenticity of the available data with respect to the specific threat assessment in NPP. (author)

[en] A storage for taking up spherical fuel elements for interim storage is designed in a way that the subcriticality is guaranteed even in the case of incidents. The storage consisting of cylindrical shafts under inert gas atmosphere can also take up fuel elements with different states of burn-up occurring during a rapid core evacuation. Absorber balls are continuously added to the fuel elements with the mixture ratio depending on the state of burn-up of the fuel elements. The decay heat is removed via a redundant cooling system. (orig.)

[en] A scalable 16-ch thermal neutron detection system has been developed in the framework of the upgrade of a neutron diffractometer. The detector is based on a ZnS:"6LiF scintillator with embedded WLS fibers which are read out with SiPMs. In this paper, we present the 16-ch module, the dedicated readout electronics, a direct comparison between the performance of the diffractometer obtained with the current "3He detector and with the 16-ch detection module, and the channel-to-channel uniformity.