Jacob Capps successfully defended his dissertation on June 1. His dissertation “Application and Validation of Geant4 Modeling for Optimization of Complex Structures for Fast Neutron Detection” describes and validates a sophisticated simulation of a variety of neutron detection systems.
Jake came to OSU from West Point having completed an MS at the Naval Postgraduate School with Dr. Craig Smith on experimental characterization of inorganic scintillators. He was going to continue that work on a novel hybrid technology from the Kharkiv Institute for Scintillation Materials but COVID19 made travel to perform experiments impossible so he switched to a very successful effort to simulate the detector systems using the geant4 software suite. This involved novel work incorporating the optical properties of granular gadolinium orthosilicate into the model and experimental validation of the simulation with numerous sources and detector materials. The code he developed allows the design of new neutron detection systems.
Jake is now returning to West Point as an Academy Professor. Congratulations Jake!