Induced temporal signatures for point-source detection

Detection of radioactive point sources is inherently divided into two regimes encompassing stationary and moving detectors. The two cases differ in their treatment of background radiation and its influence on detection sensitivity. Stationary detectors are limited by the statistical fluctuation of the background, while moving detectors may be subjected to widely and irregularly varying background radiation as a result of geographical and environmental variation. This significant systematic variation, in conjunction with the statistical variation of the background, requires a very conservative threshold in order to yield the same false-positive rate as the stationary detection case. This manuscript discusses a novel detector geometry that induces a unique tune-encoded signature (TES) when exposed to point sources. The identification of temporal signatures for point sources using TES has been demonstrated and compared with the canonical method. This work demonstrates that temporal signatures mitigate systematic background variation and thus increase point-source detection in a moving detector system.