Experimental determination of gamma-ray discrimination in pillar-structured thermal neutron detectors under high gamma-ray flux

In this paper, we demonstrate a detector that has a high neutron-to-gamma discrimination of 8.5×105 with a high thermal neutron detection efficiency of 39% when exposed to a high gamma-ray field of 109 photons/cm2s. The detector is based on a silicon pillar structure filled with a neutron converter material (10B) designed to have high thermal neutron detection efficiency. The pillar dimensions are 50 µm pillar height, 2 µm pillar diameter and 2 µm spacing between adjacent pillars.