Investigation of digital electronics for the NPL Bonner Sphere Spectrometer

Abstract

A CAEN DT5780P digitizer has been used with the NPL He-3 based Bonner Sphere Spectrometer in place of conventional analogue electronics. Validation measurements have been performed in which the preamp pulses were simultaneously shaped and analysed by the digitizer and the analogue system. The NPL Van de Graaff accelerator was used to produce neutron fields of varying intensity to study the performance at different count rates up to 23 kHz. Testing has also been carried out measuring the secondary neutrons in the treatment room of a proton therapy centre. The digital system has many advantages over the analogue system in terms of portability, ease of set up, cost, and the ability to extract event timing information at 10 ns resolution by recording the data in list mode.