Pulse Shape Discrimination study with Gd loaded liquid scintillator for reactor neutrino monitoring

Abstract

Recently, technique of Gadolinium loaded liquid scintillator (Gd-LS) for reactor neutrino oscillation experiments has attracted attention as a monitor of reactor operation and ”nuclear Gain (GA)” for IAEA safeguards. For the practical use, R&D of the 1ton class compact detector, which is measurable above ground, is necessary. Especially, it is important to reduce much amount of fast neutron background induced by cosmic muons with data analysis for the measurement above ground. We developed a prototype of the Gd-LS detector with 200L of the target volume, which has Pulse Shape Discrimination (PSD) ability for the fast neutron reduction with data analysis. Usually, it is well known that it is difficult to keep high fast neutron reduction power of PSD with the large volume size such as the neutrino reactor monitor. We evaluated the PSD ability of our prototype with real fast neutrons induced by the muons in our laboratory above ground, and we could confirm to keep the high fast neutron reduction power with even our large detector size.