Sensing Materials
Our sensors use new materials with novel characteristics, such as new semiconductors, crystals, polymers, reagents and other recently developed materials. These new materials are extraordinarily sensitive, some of which respond to trace exposures of specific chemical compounds, such as explosives, nerve agents, or biological proteins. Other new materials respond to low intensity radioactive emissions or specific types of electromagnetic energy, such as specific bands of infrared light. Many of these materials did not exist a few years ago or could not be sufficiently purified or economically assembled into functional structures. These new materials are now the key starting point in our development of extremely compact sensors, imagers and detectors.
In order to transform these materials into sensors, imagers and detectors, we must ensure that these materials are precisely powered. We have sought technologies that incorporate innovative, compact and high-speed electrical circuits, amplifiers, power supplies, communications interfaces and embedded operating systems. Many of the new security threats are so disparate, or move so quickly, that even the best conventional sensors often give off signals with significant static which can be difficult to interpret. Our products are embedded with sophisticated software to separate static from the signal.
Our various chemical detectors incorporate a number of different technologies, including enzyme-based detection, mass spectrometry, the same AFP technology at the core of our explosives detectors and gamma spectroscopy, adapted from our radiation detectors.