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A Geiger counter measures ionizing radiation. Geiger counters can detect photons, alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, but not neutrons. The sensor is a Geiger-Müller tube, a gas-filled tube that briefly conducts electricity when a particle or photon of radiation briefly makes the gas conductive. The instrument amplifies this signal and displays it to the user, either as a current measurement (needle, lamp) or an audible click.

The Geiger-Müller tube is one form of a class of radiation detectors called gaseous detectors or simply gas detectors. Although useful, cheap and robust, a counter using a GM tube can only detect the presence and intensity of radiation.

Gas detectors with the ability (due to their construction, gas filling, and associated electronics) to both detect radiation and determine particle energy levels are called proportional counters. Some proportional counters can detect the position and/or angle of the incident radiation as well. Some of these have many internal wires and electrodes and are called multi-wire proportional counter s or simply MWPCs, and have been used extensively in nuclear physics/medicine, particle physics, astronomy and in industry.

Other devices detecting radiation include:

solid-state track detector s,

1 See also

1.1 General

• Timeline of inventionThis is a list of inventions, listed in chronological order. Significant inventions not assigned pre homo sapiens technology: spoken languages; meaning the actual set of words and grammatical structure rather than the evolution of the biological ability f
• Measuring instrumentIn physics and engineering, measurement is the activity of comparing physical quantities of real-world objects and events. Established standard objects and events are used as units, and the measurement results in a given number for the relationship betwee
• Hardware random number generatorIn computing, a hardware random number generator is an apparatus which generates random numbers from a physical process. Such devices are typically based on microscopic phenomena such as thermal noise or the photoelectric effect or other quantum phenomena

1.2 People

• James Van AllenJames Alfred Van Allen (born September 7 1914) is an American physicist associated with the University of Iowa. The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him, following the 1958 satellite missions ( Explorer I and Explorer III) in which Van Allen had
• Hans Geiger
• Walther BotheWalther Wilhelm Georg Bothe ( January 8, 1891 February 8, 1957) was a German physicist, mathematician, chemist, and Nobel Prize winner. Bothe won a Nobel Prize in Physics for 1954 (along with Max Born) for his invention of the coincidence circuit. Biograp