Abstract
Coincidence and time-of-flight measurement techniques are employed to tag fission neutrons emitted from a 252Cf source sealed on one side with a very thin layer of Au. The source is positioned within a gaseous 4He scintillator detector. Together with α particles, both light and heavy fission fragments pass through the thin layer of Au and are detected. The fragments enable the corresponding fission neutrons, which are detected in a NE-213 liquid-scintillator detector, to be tagged. The resulting continuous polychromatic beam of tagged neutrons has an energy dependence that agrees qualitatively with expectations. We anticipate that this technique will provide a cost-effective means for the characterization of neutron-detector efficiency in the energy range 1–6MeV.
Highlights
We recently reported on our efforts to “tag” fast neutrons from an 241Am/9Be source [1] as the first step towards the development of a source-based fastneutron irradiation facility
The top panel is plotted on a logarithmic scale to better illustrate the overall features of the spectrum, while the bottom panel is plotted on a linear scale to emphasize certain of these features
A distribution corresponding to heavy fission fragments is shown here centered at channel 950, while that corresponding to light fission fragments is centered at
Summary
We recently reported on our efforts to “tag” fast neutrons from an 241Am/9Be source [1] as the first step towards the development of a source-based fastneutron irradiation facility. We report on our investigation of a 252Cf. Preprint submitted to Applied Radiation and Isotopes fission-fragment fast-neutron tagging technique very similar to that reported on by Reiter et al [2]. In contrast to Reiter et al who employed a thin layer of plastic scintillator to detect the fragments, we use a gaseous 4He-based scintillator detector. The corresponding fission neutrons are detected in a NE-213 [3] liquid-scintillator detector. This effort represents our first step towards the development of an apparatus for the measurement of absolute neutron-detection efficiency at our facility
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