Neutron – Alpha irradiation response of superheated emulsion detectors

We report new experimental investigations of the response of single superheated emulsion detectors with small droplet (<30µm radii) size distributions to both α- and neutron irradiations. Analysis of the results in terms of the underlying detector physics yields a toy model which reasonably reproduces the observations, and identifies the initial energy of the α in the liquid and distribution of droplet sizes as primarily responsible for the detector capacity to distinguish between nuclear recoil and α events.