NASA SBIR 2016 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc.
44 Hunt Street
Watertown, MA 02472 - 4699
(617) 668-6801

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Dr. James Christian PhD
jchristian@rmdinc.com
44 Hunt St.
Watertown, MA 02474 - 4699
(617) 668-6897

CORPORATE/BUSINESS OFFICIAL (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Carmen Danforth
CDanforth@rmdinc.com
44 Hunt Street
Watertown, MA 02472 - 4699
(617) 668-6846

Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) at beginning and end of contract:
Begin: 3
End: 4

Technology Available (TAV) Subtopics
Detector Technologies for UV, X-Ray, Gamma-Ray and Cosmic-Ray Instruments is a Technology Available (TAV) subtopic that includes NASA Intellectual Property (IP). Do you plan to use the NASA IP under the award?
No

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
To detect air fluorescence generated from cosmic rays with energies exceeding 1019 eV, which are rare events that produce small light flashes at the detector, a large-area, high sensitivity UV (300-400 nm), single-photon detector is needed. Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc. (RMD), proposes to design and develop large-area solid-state photomultipliers (SSPMs) based on wide band-gap materials. As the intrinsic carrier concentration is directly related to the band gap of the material, the thermally generated dark current associated with WBG materials will be much lower than silicon for a sufficiently small defect density in the bulk material. The proposed WBG SSPMs will have high gain (105-106), low noise (100 times lower than similar size Si based device), fast response (<5ns), high detection efficiency (>50%) and sensitivity to a single photoelectron at wavelengths between 300 and 400 nm. In phase-I efforts we will explore different design options to improve detection efficiency, response time of the GPD structure. Based on improved GPD structures we will design and fabricate 3mm x 3mm WBG SSPMs. Finally, its basic performance will be evaluated and compared to SSPMs from other vendors and PMTs. The Phase-II effort will develop the large-area multi-element devices and the readout for imaging.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
- Cherenkov telescopes to study high energy gamma rays
- Low noise, high gain, single photon detectors of dark matter searches
- Single photon UV detectors for scintillation based gamma/neutron detectors and spectrometers for planetary science

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
- Radiation dosimetry
- Cherenkov detectors for high energy physics
- Gamma/neutron spectroscopy
- Medical imaging such as PET and SPECT
- Portal monitors for nuclear material identification
- Radiation detectors for oil logging