Principle of Operation
Geiger counter instruments consist of two main elements; the Geiger-Muller tube and the processing and display electronics. The radiation sensing element is an inert gas-filled Geiger-Muller tube (usually containing helium, neon or argon with halogens added) which briefly conducts electrical charge when a particle or photon of radiation makes the gas conductive by ionization. The tube has the property of being able to amplify each ionization event by means of the avalanche effect and produces an easily measured current pulse which is passed to the processing electronics. The readout can be analogue or digital.
Read more about this topic: Geiger Counter
Famous quotes containing the words principle and/or operation:
“Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)