Abstract
This paper deals with the design of a novel spectrometer of fast neutrons in nuclear safeguards applications based on the liquid organic scintillator EJ-309 with materials of different thickness surrounding the detector. The investigation was performed on the simulated data obtained by the MCNPX-PoliMi numerical code based on the Monte Carlo method. Among the various materials (polyethylene, iron, aluminum, and graphite) investigated as layers around the scintillator, polyethylene and iron have shown the most promising characteristics for evaluation of fast neutron energy spectra. The simulated pulse height distributions were summed up for each energy bin in the neutron energy range between 1 MeV and 15 MeV in order to obtain better counting statistics. The unfolded results for monoenergetic neutron sources obtained by a first order of Tikhonov regularization and non-linear neural network show very good agreement with the reference data while the evaluated spectra of neutron sources continuous in energy follow the trend of the reference spectra. The possible advantages of a novel spectrometer include a less number of input data for processing and a less sensitivity to the noise compared to the scintillation detector without surrounding materials.
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