Neutron-gamma discrimination based on quantum clustering technique

摘要

In this study, the digital neutron-gamma discrimination (DNGD) has been undertaken based on the pulse-shape discrimination on the anode pulse of a 2 '' by 2 '' right cylinder BC501A liquid scintillator with a fast data acquisition card (14-bit resolution, 500 MS/s). Seven different features of the anode pulse have been extracted and the discrimination based on quantum clustering (DBQC) has been studied. The influence of three different parameters (i.e., eta, sigma and K) on the discrimination figure-of-merit (FoM) has been investigated. In addition, the FoM dependencies on different choices of DBQC features have been determined. A 100 mCi Am-241-Be neutron source has been used for the DNGD and the calibration has been made with a 1.1 mu Ci Na-22 gamma-ray source. The results show that the FoM value is around 1 at 100 keVee bias energy, whilst this value can be improved up to 50% by choosing and setting appropriate features.