This book contains the lectures, seminars and abstracts of short communications delivered at the above summer school. The talks are an updated account of the methods used in the detection of radioactivity in nature and in the study of its spread in the environment.

This study edition of Blum and Rolandi's successful book addresses those students who want to begin to understand particle detection and drift chambers, by providing a solid foundation for judging the achievable accuracy for coordinate and ionization measurements. It covers topics such as gas ionization by particles and by laser rays; the drift of electrons and ions in gases; electrostatics of wire grids and field cages; amplification of ionization; creation of the signal track parameters and their errors; ion gates; particle identification by measurement of ionization; existing chambers; drift chamber gas. The topics are treated in a text-book style with many figures, together with explicitly performed calculations.

The response to a 1/E neutron spectrum of a hydrogen-filled proportional counter in the energy region below 100 keV was studied using pulse-shape discrimination to reject gamma-induced background. The observed proton-recoil distributions permitted an evaluation of W (the energy loss per ion pair) for protons in hydrogen below 19 keV. Some problems associated with the use of 4Pi-recoil proportional counters as neutron spectrometers were considered including calibration, optimization of neutron-to-gamma ratios, and resolving power.