SLIMER’s Polonium-210 Decay Analysis for Microbial Research

The world of microbiology is complex, diverse, and extremely interconnected, making it hard to study a microorganism species or its interaction with the ecosystem. Hoping to make a sensitive tool for analyzing microbial ecosystems, the Scintillator-Layered Imagining Microscope for Environmental Research, or SLIMER, was developed at Los Alamos Lab and given to Tennessee Technological University.

SLIMER utilizes a commercial fluorescence-imaging microscope, CsI(Tl) scintillators, and an electron multiplying charge-coupled camera to detect radioactive decays’ intensity and location. The radioactive source releases electrons which enter the scintillator’s columnar structure and totally internally reflects, maintaining the position information, and enter the camera as light. A study of this system used Polonium-210 to relate the pixel intensity volume of a detected event to the energy of emitted alpha particles. The study found that while location and volume intensities could be taken from detected events, further refinement is needed before being able to relate the volume intensities to emitted energy levels of a particular source.

Although originally for soil analysis, SLIMER has applications for many fields ranging from geological dating to extremophile studies for astrobiology.