Improved method for the determination of neutron energies from their times-of-flight

The kinetic energy of a neutron is determined experimentally by measuring its time-of-flight and flight distance from the source to the detector. However, this determination is vitiated by errors since the exact location of the interaction of the neutron within the detector is unknown. Moreover, more than one interaction may be necessary for the deposited energy to reach the detector threshold. We compare the different existing energy determination methods and introduce the method which gives the minimum-variance unbiased estimator of the neutron energy. The method is based of the inversion of the detector response function, for which we propose a universal algorithm. It is shown that the precision of the new method does not deteriorate with the length of the detector, which opens the possibility of conceiving detectors with a higher efficiency.