Re:What happens if you stick your head in a particle acceler...
by analog31 on Monday August 09, 2021 @10:15PM
(#28124540)
The sievert is the SI replacement to the rem, (roentgen equivelent, man). These are units of radiation dose that are scaled according to the health effect of the type of radiation. What you may need is a conversion from a radiometric unit (energy equivalent dose) to sieverts, for the particular frequency of microwaves.
Every type of particle, and band of wavelengths, has its own damage mechanism in the body, making the choice of a unit of measure complicated.
I'm not a nuclear physicist, but remember just a bit from my radiation safety training to work in an accelerator lab for a brief time period. Today I work with optics, and there are formulas in the regulations for laser and UV safety. They are quite definitely scientifically based. For instance, the UV wavelength with the highest weighting factor for hazard determination is the absorbance peak of DNA.
Hope that doesn't answer your question (since I'm not an expert anyway), but sheds some light on the complexity of the problem.
Where I went to grad school, they had one of the earliest accelerator physics programs. I remember a story, that the old timers would adjust the beam by closing their eyes and letting the particles cause scintillation inside their eyeballs. That was when beams were vastly less energetic, and in any event, I don't think they did this for very long without realizing the danger. In addition to the beam itself, an accelerator can give off a lot of X rays due to secondary radiation processes. The entire accelerator lab was behind a labyrinth of brick walls, and had an interlock system to make sure nobody was in the tunnel when the machine got started up.
Every type of particle, and band of wavelengths, has its own damage mechanism in the body, making the choice of a unit of measure complicated.
I'm not a nuclear physicist, but remember just a bit from my radiation safety training to work in an accelerator lab for a brief time period. Today I work with optics, and there are formulas in the regulations for laser and UV safety. They are quite definitely scientifically based. For instance, the UV wavelength with the highest weighting factor for hazard determination is the absorbance peak of DNA.
Hope that doesn't answer your question (since I'm not an expert anyway), but sheds some light on the complexity of the problem.
Where I went to grad school, they had one of the earliest accelerator physics programs. I remember a story, that the old timers would adjust the beam by closing their eyes and letting the particles cause scintillation inside their eyeballs. That was when beams were vastly less energetic, and in any event, I don't think they did this for very long without realizing the danger. In addition to the beam itself, an accelerator can give off a lot of X rays due to secondary radiation processes. The entire accelerator lab was behind a labyrinth of brick walls, and had an interlock system to make sure nobody was in the tunnel when the machine got started up.