Do-it-yourself geiger counters

Lecture/lab sessions: 5 sessions / week, 4 hours / session.

This course lasts for one week, meeting on five consecutive days. The first three sessions are a mix of lecture and lab time, while the final two sessions are just lab time.

Welcome to the first DIY Geiger counter class! You are embarking on an educational experiment, designed to provide a hands-on, interactive introduction to Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) at MIT. Rather than bore you with lectures, we believe that direct, physical engagement is the best way to jump right into a new and unfamiliar subject. Everything that we present on the board, you will be exploring and proving using your own hand-built Geiger counters. You will explore different types and sources of radiation, how to detect them, how to shield them, how to accurately count / measure their activity, and explore cryptographical applications of radiation. This course is meant to be enjoyable and rigorous at the same time.

We hope you will learn and put to use a diverse set of skills, both theoretical and practical, by the end of this course. While we will cover many topics during this course, most will be at an intuitive, freshman-accessible level for the sake of time and ease of learning. Specific objectives of this course include:

Students should expect 2 to 4 hours of homework per night.

The course grade is based on laboratory reports, problem sets, and a completed working Geiger counter. There are no exams.

Since this course is only one week long, we had to get creative with homework assignments. Therefore, we have constructed the following rules for this course:

There are two types of homework assignments: Problem Sets and a Lab Report.

This course may look jam-packed with things to learn and assignments to do, but it really isn't. All the assignments are designed to:

Therefore, if you do the readings, the assignments should be relatively easy. If you do well on the assignments, the lab reports should be very easy!

Geiger counter circuits (1 hour)

Finish Geiger counter lab (4 hours)

As time allows, build a random number generator for cryptography

Pset 3 due

Lab report due 3 days later

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