Approved by the UNLV Marking and Office of Information Technology, two computer servers at HERD—Neutron and Photon—are up and running with domain names as neutron.unlv.edu and photon.unlv.edu. Both servers are running Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS with Geant4, MCNPX, MariaDB, Matlab, and PHP. The purpose of these Linux servers is for Monte Carlo Simulations of Nuclear Processes and Radiation Spectra Collection and Analysis. At this time, both servers can only be accessed by SSH on campus. Anyone interested in MC simulations and Spectra Analysis can contact Dr. Sun to establish a local account on the servers.

Dr. Krishnakumar from the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research joined the group as a postdoc scholar. He received his Ph.D. in Physics in the area of radiation dosimetry from Bharathiar University, India. He has two decades of progressive professional work experience in health physics services, radiation detectors, gamma spectrometry, and radiation dosimetry. His involvement will strengthen our experimental activities in radiation detection and radiation dosimetry.

Dr. Sun and his colleagues in Carolina published an article “A Study of the Organic and Nonorganic Food Ingredients with Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis” in Radiation Science and Technology. The article indicates that INAA is a sensitive radioanalytical tool to tell the elemental information on atomic or nuclear levels, however, as a nuclear technique, INAA lacks the capability to probe the properties of compounds on the molecular level, which may be the real difference between organic and nonorganic food.