Application of artificial neural network in neutron/gamma pulse shape discrimination for EJ301 scintillation detector

Abstract

The scintilator detectors are sensitive to both neutron and gamma radiation. Therefore, right identification of the pulses which generated by neutrons or gamma ray from these detectors plays an important role in neutron measurement by using scintilator detector. In order to improve the ability to pulse shape discrimination (PSD), many PSD techniques have been studied, developed and applied. In this work, we use a basic configuration of a Fully connected Neural network (Fc- Net) where the number of elements of the network is minimum, and each element corresponds to identified specification of neutron or gamma pulses measured by using EJ-301 scintilator detector. The minimum of error principle has been applied for neuron network design; therefore, the accuracy of recognitions did not affect by this reduced network. The obtained results show that the identify accuracy of FcNet is higher than those of digital charge integration (DCI) method. Being tested using 60Co radioactive source, it is shown that, with the application of the FcNet, the accuracy of the gamma pulses discrimination acquires 98.60% in the energy region from 50 to 2000 keV electron equivalent energy (keVee), and 95.59% in the energy region from 50 to 150 keVee. In general, the obtained results indicate that the artificial neural network method can be applied to build neutron/gamma spectrometers with limited hardware.