September 25, 2003

New York State Senators Visit NSLS

Learn About Lab’s Homeland Security Initiatives, More

Last Friday, September 12, New York State Senator Michael Balboni, 7th District, who chairs the Senate Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs, and New York State Senator John Flanagan, 2nd District, who, among other contributions, is a member of that same Committee, visited BNL with Jim Sherry, Counsel to Balboni.

After being welcomed by BNL Director Praveen Chaudhari, as well as DOE’s Brookhaven Area Office Manager Michael Holland, Associate Laboratory Director for Energy, Environment & National Security Ralph James, and Assistant Laboratory Director for Community, Education, Government & Public Affairs Marge Lynch, the party was taken to the Lab’s Radiation Detector Testing & Evaluation Facility (RADTEC).

There, Charles Finfrock of the Energy Sciences & Technology Department; Biays Bowerman of the Environmental Sciences Department; and Paul Moskowitz of the Nonproliferation & National Security (NNS) Department outlined the purpose of RADTEC, which is twofold — to assemble, operate, and test commercial and government off-the-shelf technologies targeted for various homeland security applications, and to provide baseline data for comparison purposes. At the facility, researchers collect baseline data on various types of detectors, and are available to provide assistance in training city, state, and federal officials to operate the detectors and interpret the results. RADTEC is open to all commercial and government technology vendors and is expected to become an important resource for local, county, state, and federal officials.

The visitors next stopped at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), to meet Associate Laboratory Director for Light Sources and NSLS Chair Steven Dierker and NSLS scientist Peter Siddons, who gave an overview of some of the research done in such diverse fields as biology and physics, chemistry and geophysics, materials science and medicine. The group then saw beam line X12A, where detectors being developed by BNL and others in support of homeland security initiatives are inspected at a new testing station.

The tour continued at the Instrumentation Division, where, in collaboration of NNS is developing a detector that acts as a camera to make images of objects that emit low-energy neutrons. As Vanier explained, since there are very few natural background neutrons, and they are uniformly distributed, a concentrated source of neutrons is strong evidence of a manmade device, such as a plutonium weapon, or of spent nuclear fuel.

Graham Smith, Instrumentation, then showed the visitors a working prototype of a xenon-filled gamma ray spectrometer that BNL is developing to detect radioisotopes potentially in the terrorist arsenal, such as dirty bomb materials. Xenon detectors can be built in very large sizes, so as to pick up signals of radioisotopes more quickly and over a wider area than do instruments now available. Hence, these detectors will be suitable for homeland security applications.

One of BNL’s most enormous detectors, STAR, provided the next stop on the tour. The visitors learned from Tim Hallman, Collider Accelerator Department, that STAR tracks and analyzes thousands of particles, such as protons, neutrons, and pions, that may be produced in collisions of two beams of subatomic particles speeding around the tunnel at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). In the RHIC experiment, scientists expect to discover more about conditions that existed in the first few microseconds of the universe.

The visit concluded at the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) facility, where David Schlyer, Chemistry Department, described some of the Lab’s pioneering neuroimaging research on the brain chemistry of addiction, aging, and diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and the recent PET research on imaging awake animals. Some of this work has veterinary support from the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

ARTICLE BY: Liz Seubert, BNL Science Writer

PHOTO BY: Roger Stoutenburgh, BNL Photographer