Investigation of Large LGB Detectors for Antineutrino Detection

Abstract

A detector material or configuration that can provide an unambiguous indication of neutron capture can substantially reduce random coincidence backgrounds in antineutrino detection and capture-gated neutron spectrometry applications. Here we investigate the performance of such a material, a composite of plastic scintillator and ${}^6$Li${}_6^{nat}$Gd${(}^{10}$BO${}_3{)}_3$:Ce (LGB) crystal shards of ~1 mm dimension and comprising 1% of the detector by mass. While it is found that the optical propagation properties of this material as currently fabricated are only marginally acceptable for antineutrino detection, its neutron capture identification ability is encouraging.

6 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Nuclear Instruments and Methods A

References in corpus (2)

• Experimental Results from an Antineutrino Detector for Cooperative Monitoring of Nuclear Reactors
• Improved Fast Neutron Spectroscopy via Detector Segmentation

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Fabrication and characterization of a lithium-glass-based composite neutron detector
• A prototype for SANDD: A highly-segmented pulse-shape-sensitive plastic scintillator detector incorporating silicon photomultiplier arrays
• Measuring Fast Neutrons with Large Liquid Scintillation Detector for Ultra-low Background Experiments
• A Note on Neutron Capture Correlation Signals, Backgrounds, and Efficiencies
• ${}^6$Li-loaded liquid scintillators produced by direct dissolution of compounds in diisopropylnaphthalene (DIPN)
• Performance of large-scale 6Li-doped pulse-shape discriminating plastic scintillators