NUCE 450 Nuclear Engineering with Coding Assignment

Nuclear Engineering with Coding Assignment

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Pulse Shape Discrimination with Organic Scintillation Detector:

OBJECTIVE 

Professor Flaska and Professor Lintereur have been interested in developing a detection system that would be able to simultaneously measure neutrons and gamma rays. In other words, they are designing a pulse shape discrimination (PSD) detection system. They found an organic scintillation detector (stilbene) and a fast-waveform digitizer, and they think such a system should work. They went ahead and collected data, and now they need your help to assess the PSD quality of the proposed detection system (if any). Therefore, they will be sending you the data file from their experiment, and they need you to analyze the data and provide answers to the following fundamental questions.

1. Is the proposed detection system capable of PSD? If so, quantify the PSD performance using the figure of merit discussed during NucE 450 lectures.

2. If the proposed detection system does have PSD capabilities, discuss how to further improve them.

READING ASSIGNMENT 

Knoll, Chapter 8, pulse shape discrimination

NucE 450 lectures

EQUIPMENT 

The equipment that Professor Flaska and Professor Lintereur used to acquire the data is listed in Table 1.

DATA 

You will be sent a single text file. The file contains a single column of data, and each data point corresponds to one pulse sample (the so-called analog-to-digital (ADC) value; this value can be converted to voltage). The digitizer used during the experiment (CAEN DT5730) samples (discretizes) incoming analog pulses at 500-MHz rate; therefore, the step between two adjacent samples is 2 ns. This time step is constant. The digitizer cannot process pulses larger than 0.5 V, and thus the so-called dynamic range (y-axis of each pulses) is sampled with a 14-bit resolution. Therefore, the 0.5-V range (pulse height) on the y-axis is sampled by 214 = 16384 steps. In other words, each ADC increment from the data file corresponds to = 0.5 V / 16384 = 3.05e-5 V. There are exactly 50,000 pulses in the data file, and each pulse has exactly 1000 samples.  Nuclear Engineering with Coding Assignment

EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE 

A Cf-252 source was placed 2” from the stilbene-SiPM detector assembly, and 50,000 pulses were collected into a single text file. A voltage of 54.7 V was applied to the Hamamatsu SiPM.

DATA RESULTS AND ANALYSIS 

Plot the integral-ratio histogram, after you have optimized the start point of the tail integral. The end point for both tail and total integrals should be set to sample # 1000 (all pulses samples available are to be utilized). Make sure you label neutrons and gamma rays in your plot.

DISCUSSION 

The following questions will assist you in achieving the objectives of this analysis.

1. How does PSD work in PSD-capable organic scintillators?
2. Do you see a clear separation of neutrons and gamma rays?
3. Clearly, since the CAEN DT5730 digitizer was used to collect the data, the original analog pulses from stilbene were discretized (digitized). Since the y-axis stops at 0.5 V, how large is the noise in mV? Look at the samples prior to a pulse itself.

Nuclear Engineering with Coding Assignment

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