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Definitely getting warmer!
Hint: It is not a "counter"

Hint:
It's made to measure one kind of radiation selectively in the presence of another kind of radiation

No correct guess yet.
Here are a few more pictures:

@gigabecquerel is it supposed to become hot in vacuum and then emit some atoms / ions in small quantities?

@wolf480pl Nope, not at all!

@wolf480pl Emitting particles internally is part of its function, but not its purpose

@gigabecquerel ok now I don't know if massless- (photons) and pseudo- (phonons) particles count as particles...

But assuming they do,
if emitting particles is not the purpose of this device, then maybe absorbing particles is?

Is this a type of detector?

@wolf480pl Oh no no we're talking about real, massive particles here.

It is a detector!

@gigabecquerel people were guessing 16h ago that it's a neutron detector, but you said 40min ago that no correct guesses, so it must be a something-else-detector.

Do the particles it's supposed to detect have a non-zero electric charge?

@wolf480pl I never said it's not a neutron detector, just, that there were no correct guesses so far

@gigabecquerel uhh so it could be a specific type of neutron detector... I don't know enough about neutron detectors to be able to know what types exist

@wolf480pl The type is the interesting part!
Some clever engineering went into it to detect neutrons under the conditions it does

@gigabecquerel that's clever.

Are there other particles that a regular neutron detector woukd confuse for neutrons?