Measurement of D-3He proton yield with CR-39 as a diagnostic for inertial confinement fusion experiments. Final report, 7 January 1983-30 September 1984

The first phase of our research project has as its main goal the development of an image analysis system for Solid State Nuclear Track Detectors (SSNTD) readout. Section I, of this report is an introduction to SSNTDs and image analysis systems for automatic track counting. The development of the image analysis system is described in Section II. The development of our foil holder system is described in Section III. The performance of an image analysis system can only be judged with respect to a particular type of image which is to be analyzed. In order to insure the workability of our image analysis system in analyzing CR-39 SSNTDs, we have made an effort to improve our etching system and our etch procedure. The development of our etching system and our etch procedure is outlined in Section IV. Also included in Section IV are images of protons and alpha particle tracks for our etch procedure. The performance of our image analysis system is reported in Section V for the proton and alpha particle tracks which are reported in Section IV. Also, the performance of the image analysis system is reported for some test images