Question: what nuclear machines are you looking at and how would they work?

Thomas Biggans answered on 22 Jun 2016:

I don’t use nuclear machines exactly, my department is called nuclear medicine because we use radioactive substances to find disease and treat illnesses. The machines I use detect the radiation in a special way so we can build up a picture of where the radiation is in the body.

They work by using a scintillation crystal, when a ray of radiation hits the crystal it is absorbed and a flash of light happens at the part of the crystal where the radiation was absorbed. We use a device called a PMT to detect this flash of light and convert it into an electrical signal which we send to a computer. The computer collects all of these signals and uses them to make our picture.