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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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The Frisch-Peierls memorandum: A seminal document of nuclear history
The Manhattan Project is usually considered to have been initiated with Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in October 1939. However, a lesser-known document that was just as impactful on wartime nuclear history was the so-called Frisch-Peierls memorandum. Prepared by two refugee physicists at the University of Birmingham in Britain in early 1940, this manuscript was the first technical description of nuclear weapons and their military, strategic, and ethical implications to reach high-level government officials on either side of the Atlantic. The memorandum triggered the initiation of the British wartime nuclear program, which later merged with the Manhattan Engineer District.
Fateme Fahiman, Mahdi Kafaee, Ali Moussavi-Zarandi, and Meisam Fahiman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 187 | Number 1 | July 2014 | Pages 69-81
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-65
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, a board based on a Spartan-3 field-programmable gate array was designed as a hardware prototyping platform for development of a multichannel digital gamma spectrometer. The device is compatible with various detectors like high-purity germanium, NaI, and CsI detectors. Before implementing the hardware, the method for digital signal processing for gamma spectroscopy was developed. The aim of this paper is to introduce a robust tool suitable for optimizing the design of complicated systems. The characteristics of this method, such as its ability to implement adaptive shaping, are investigated. The optimum conditions for digital filtering were determined using MATLAB/Simulink. This scheme can be useful for commercial production. Simulation was used to examine each processing unit in the whole signal processing procedure including cusplike shaping. The proposed method can be used as a computer design tool for optimizing digital multichannel analyzers or digital nuclear spectrometers.
