Blue Screen of Death: Can Cosmic Rays Crash Your Computer?

They can incapacitate satellites, cause plane autopilot systems to disengage without warning and change the result of an election. Cosmic rays that bombard electronic devices can cause a variety of failures that can be hard to predict, difficult to detect, and tricky to mitigate. In this talk, we will discuss how cosmic ray radiation interacts with electronic devices in a variety of environments, from deep space mission vehicles to the cell phone in your pocket. We’ll go over the types of transient errors and long-term damage that can arise in the electronic devices. We will then talk about mitigation strategies, and how particle accelerators such as TRIUMF’s 520-MeV cyclotron are one of the main tools used by engineers and researchers worldwide to test the effects of radiation on electronic components in a simple yet highly effective way, making sure that the electronic devices we rely on for so many things keep working as intended. (Also available in French.)

Camille Bélanger-Champagne completed her PhD at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, working on the D0 experiment at Fermilab and the ATLAS experiment at CERN. She was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and at the Helsinki Institute of Physics. Since 2018, she is the coordinator for TRIUMF’s Irradiation Facilities in Vancouver, an internationally recognized laboratory for radiation testing of electronic components. (Also available in French.)