An inner-crystal neutron-scatter camera: Monte carlo simulation

Abstract

Neutron energy emitted from special nuclear materials (SNMs) can be measured by using neutronproton scattering; also, the scattering angle can be calculated from the ratio of the scattered energy to the incident energy. By using position and energy information, we can image the original source position by using the backprojection and list-mode maximum-likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) method. In this paper, we propose an inner-crystal neutron scatter camera system in which the detectors are not separated to obtain interactions at a variety of scatter angles; based on this system, we analyzed the characteristics of the corresponding neutron-scattering camera. The factors that affected the neutron-scatter image were the neutron velocity after scattering, the cut-off level of the time of flight (ToF), and the width of the cones used for image reconstruction. To determine the optimal point for the reconstruction of an image, we estimated the performance of the system by using the figure of merit (FoM). The optimal neutron-velocity (d/ToF) was ~0.3 × 107 m/s according to our simulation result, while the optimal cut-off level of the ToF was 4 ns as the latter minimized the noise while maintaining the required efficiency. The widths of the cones (e) also affected the full width at half maximum (FWHM) and the noise of the image. In terms of a simple source-geometry, whereby concepts such as “point source” were used, a large e value was suitable to achieve noise reduction; however, regarding the complicated source geometry, a small e value was favorable for precise reconstruction of the original source geometry for both the backprojection and the list-mode MLEM methods.