Improved fission neutron energy discrimination with 4He detectors through pulse filtering

This paper presents experimental and computational techniques implemented for 4He gas scintillation detectors for induced fission neutron detection. Fission neutrons are produced when natural uranium samples are actively interrogated by 2.45 MeV deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction neutrons. Fission neutrons of energies greater than 2.45 MeV can be distinguished by their different scintillation pulse height spectra since 4He detectors retain incident fast neutron energy information. To enable the preferential detection of fast neutrons up to 10 MeV and suppress low-energy event counts, the detector photomultiplier gain is lowered and trigger threshold is increased. Pile-up and other unreliable events due to the interrogating neutron flux and background radiation are filtered out prior to the evaluation of pulse height spectra. With these problem-specific calibrations and data processing, the 4He detector's accuracy at discriminating fission neutrons up to 10 MeV is improved and verified with 252Cf spontaneous fission neutrons. Given the 4He detector's ability to differentiate fast neutron sources, this proof-of-concept active-interrogation measurement demonstrates the potential of special nuclear materials detection using a 4He fast neutron detection system.