Pulsed pyroelectric crystal-powered gamma source

A compact pulsed gamma generator is being developed to replace radiological sources used in commercial, industrial and medical applications. Mono-energetic gammas are produced in the 0.4 - 1.0 MeV energy range using nuclear reactions such as 9Be(d,n gamma )10B. The gamma generator employs an RF-driven inductively coupled plasma ion source to produce deuterium ion current densities up to 2 mA/mm2 and ampere-level current pulses can be attained by utilizing an array extraction grid. The extracted deuterium ions are accelerated to approximately 300 keV via a compact stacked pyroelectric crystal system and then bombard the beryllium target to generate gammas. The resulting microsecond pulse of gammas is equivalent to a radiological source with curie-level activity.