Calibration and operation of a neutron time-of-flight scintillator array on nova

摘要

The Tion diagnostic is a 1020-channel scintillator array on the Nova laser at Livermore. It measures the arrival time of single d-d or d-t neutrons at 27 m from the target with a time resolution of 4 ns. The effect of neutron scattering has been obtained from Monte-Carlo neutron transport simulations and the scattered response is convolved with a gaussian source to fit the data. The data analysis has been checked using targets which produce roughly equal numbers of d-t and d-d counts. The spectrum from Tion is in reasonable agreement with conventional neutron time-of-flight detectors at yields above 3 x 10(sup 8).