Special Nuclear Material (SNM) Detection

Detection, monitoring, and characterization of nuclear materials will be a key challenge of this decade. Alone in border security applications, the annual market potential exceeds 2 billion USD.

Radiation Detection Issues

Generally speaking, radiation detection applications face similar challenges: 

  • Source Identification: There are many different sources of radiation (man-made and naturally occurring ones). The ability to not only detect radiation but  identify the source is key. 
  • Background rejection: Radiation from cosmic and other backgrounds is always present and needs to be distinguished from sources of interest.
  • Availability of detection materials: Many commonly used detection materials, such as He-3, are rare and only available in limited supply.
  • Safety: A number of detector materials are toxic, corrosive, or otherwise hazardous.
  • Scalability: Simply put, the bigger the detector, the quicker a source can be detected.
  • Cost: Some of the best detector materials are extremely costly due to the complexity of their production process or their limited availability.

Security Application Issues

The underlying issues of radiation detection manifest themselves in three major shortcomings that prevent their effective deployment in security applications:

  • Difficulty to reliably detect shielded nuclear material
  • High nuisance alarm rates caused by natural radioactivity
  • Technologies are based on toxic, expensive, or unavailable detector materials that prevent scaling up to the necessary sensitivity.

Our Unique Solution

Coming from the field of fundamental science, we are used to thinking outside the box. Accordingly, we came up with a completely new approach to radiation detection.

Our platform technology enables a number of unique solutions in several markets, based on three basic capabilities:

  • Sensitivity to fast neutrons
    Fast neutrons are difficult to shield and a tell-tale sign of weapons usable materials. Arktis' fast neutron detection technology has the potential to detect threats that escape conventional detection.
  • Suppression of background
    While a technology's sensitivity is important, its susceptibility to background noise is equally important. Rather than background subtraction, Arktis' technology allows background suppression.
  • Scalability
    Our technology is fully scalable both from a physics and a cost point of view. The Arktis platform technology does not depend on exotic detector materials.

More about our radiation detection solution >