Silicon on insulator microdosimetry for radiation protection in mixed radiation fields for aviation and space dosimetry

Radiation protection is used for determining the doses received by persons from avariety of sources. The recommendations for external radiation protection were outlined in ICRP Publication 51 and ICRP Publication 60. There is a growing need to measure the doses received from extraterrestrial sources at high altitudes. In the European Union (EU), flight staff are already classified as radiation workers following the European Commission Council Directive 96/29/EURATOM of 13 May 1996 defining the need for the exposure of the airline crew to the elevated levels of radiation to be monitored. The radiation exposure from a mixed source can be measured using a regional microdosimetric approach. The advantage of this approach is that a priori knowledge of the type of radiation is not required. The microdosimetric approach studied in this thesis is a solid state approach to microdosimetry using a Silicon on Insulator (SOI) design. The SOI Microdosimeter is advantageous over conventional low pressure gas chamber microdosimetry in that it does not require a constant supply of tissue equivalent gas or high voltages to operate and is physically small in size. The mixed radiation fields tested in this dissertation are mixed neutron gamma sources (252Cf, PuBe), the CERN-EU High Energy Reference Facility (CERF) field and the quasi-monoenergetic neutron source at Uppsala University.