A Geant4 evaluation of the Hornyak button and two candidate detectors for the TREAT hodoscope
- Kansas State Univ., Manhattan, KS (United States)
The performance of traditional Hornyak buttons and two proposed variants for fast-neutron hodoscope applications was evaluated using Geant4. The Hornyak button is a ZnS(Ag)-based device previously deployed at the Idaho National Laboratory's TRansient REActor Test Facility (better known as TREAT) for monitoring fast neutrons emitted during pulsing of fissile fuel samples. Past use of these devices relied on pulse-shape discrimination to reduce the significant levels of background Cherenkov radiation. Proposed are two simple designs that reduce the overall light guide mass (here, polymethyl methacrylate or PMMA), employ silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), and can be operated using pulse-height discrimination alone to eliminate background noise to acceptable levels. Geant4 was first used to model a traditional Hornyak button, and for assumed, hodoscope-like conditions, an intrinsic efficiency of 0.35% for mono-directional fission neutrons was predicted. The predicted efficiency is in reasonably good agreement with experimental data from the literature and, hence, served to validate the physics models and approximations employed. Geant4 models were then developed to optimize the materials and geometries of two alternatives to the Hornyak button, one based on a homogeneous mixture of ZnS(Ag) and PMMA, and one based on alternating layers of ZnS(Ag) and PMMA oriented perpendicular to the incident neutron beam. For the same radiation environment, optimized, 5-cm long (along the beam path) devices of the homogeneous and layered designs were predicted to have efficiencies of approximately 1.3% and 3.3%, respectively. For longer devices, i.e., lengths larger than 25 cm, these efficiencies were shown to peak at approximately 2.2% and 5.9%, respectively. Furthermore, both designs were shown to discriminate Cherenkov noise intrinsically by using an appropriate pulse-height discriminator level, i.e., pulse-shape discrimination is not needed for these devices.
- Research Organization:
- Kansas State Univ., Manhattan, KS (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- NE0008305
- OSTI ID:
- 1419477
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 1548715
- Journal Information:
- Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Section A, Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, Vol. 889; ISSN 0168-9002
- Publisher:
- ElsevierCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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