Verification of He-3 proportional counters fast neutron sensitivity through a comparison with He-4 detectors
arXiv:2002.08153 · doi:10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00600-8
Abstract
In the field of neutron scattering science, a large variety of instruments require detectors for thermal and cold neutrons. Helium-3 has been one of the main actors in thermal and cold neutron detection for many years. Nowadays neutron facilities around the world are pushing their technologies to increase the available flux delivered at the instruments, this enables a completely new science landscape. Complementary with the increasing available flux, a better signal-to-background ratio (S/B) enables to perform new types of measurements. To this aim, this manuscript re-examines the background sensitivity of today's "gold standard" neutron detection. Fast neutrons and gamma-rays are the main background species in neutron scattering experiments. The efficiency (sensitivity) of detecting fast neutrons, cosmic rays and gamma-rays, for a Helium-3-based detector is studied here through the comparison with Helium-4 counters. The comparison to Helium-4 allows to separate the thermal (and cold) neutron to the fast neutron contributions in Helium-3-based counters, which are otherwise entangled; verifying previous results from an indirect method. A relatively high sensitivity is found. Moreover, an estimate for the cosmic neutron fluence, also a source of background, at ground level at ESS is presented in this manuscript.
arXiv comment16 pages, 8 figures
References in corpus (17)
- Tagging fast neutrons from an 241Am/9Be source
- The Multi-Blade Boron-10-based Neutron Detector for high intensity Neutron Reflectometry at ESS
- Investigation of gamma-ray sensitivity of neutron detectors based on thin converter films
- Study of a high spatial resolution 10B-based thermal neutron detector for application in neutron reflectometry: the Multi-Blade prototype
- Multi-Grid Detector for Neutron Spectroscopy: Results Obtained on Time-of-Flight Spectrometer CNCS
- First Measurements with New High-Resolution Gadolinium-GEM Neutron Detectors
- A comparison of untagged gamma-ray and tagged-neutron yields from 241AmBe and 238PuBe sources
- Fast neutron sensitivity of neutron detectors based on boron-10 converter layers
- Characterization of the Multi-Blade 10B-based detector at the CRISP reflectometer at ISIS for neutron reflectometry at ESS
- Novel Boron-10-based detectors for Neutron Scattering Science
- Modeling high-energy cosmic ray induced terrestrial and atmospheric neutron flux: A lookup table
- A First Comparison of the responses of a He4-based fast-neutron detector and a NE-213 liquid-scintillator reference detector
- Boron-10 layers, Neutron Reflectometry and Thermal Neutron Gaseous Detectors
- Development and Characterization of a High Sensitivity Segmented Fast Neutron Spectrometer (FaNS-2)
- Neutron reflectometry with the Multi-Blade 10B-based detector
- Evidence of fast neutron sensitivity for 3He detectors and comparison with Boron-10 based neutron detectors
- The neutron tagging facility at Lund University