Vol. 4, 2019

Radiation Measurements

COMPARISON OF ENERGY RESPONSE FUNCTION OF STILBENE, BC501 AND EJ309 NEUTRON GAMMA DETECTION SYSTEM

Annesha Karmakar, Anil K. Gourishetty, A. Kelkar

Pages: 41–46

DOI: 10.37392/RapProc.2019.09

The paper discusses the energy response of a single crystal stilbene and two liquid scintillator detectors, BC501 and EJ309 to a range of neutrons and gamma energies generated using a 1.7MV Tandetron accelerator at IIT Kanpur. Stilbene is a solid-state composite organic detector can be used as an alternative choice for combined neutron-gamma detection. Studies have shown that stilbene’s light output response is similar to BC501. Works have also claimed a linear response of stilbene to neutrons for energies less than 5 MeV. In this work, neutrons are generated using the IIT-Kanpur 1.7MV Tandetron using C(Li7,n) reaction. The threshold energy of the reaction and the target thickness are determined by Monte Carlo simulations. Next, we measure the pulse height distribution of various neutron energies incident on stilbene, BC501 and EJ309 of the same dimensions. The response of all the organic crystals of the study to neutrons using the Tandetron is performed on energy spanning the fission neutron energy range to fast neutron energy range. A general-purpose Monte Carlo simulation kit, GEANT4, is used for simulating the reaction and detector response behaviour. Stilbene shows 38% lower energy response than that of EJ309 and BC501 shows 11% lower energy response from EJ309 for the entire neutron spectrum. These responses are consistent as the number density of hydrogen of the same mass of stilbene, BC501 is 38% and 11% lower than EJ309, respectively. GEANT4 simulation allows a detailed analysis of detector response physics for the advancement of detector development for nuclear security applications.
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