Identifying thermal neutrons, fast neutrons, and gamma rays by using a scintillator-based time-of-flight method

Abstract An experiment based on a boron-loaded plastic scintillator as a neutron-sensitive media and a fast digital readout was implemented by means of time-of-flight method to distinguish γ -rays and fast neutrons as well as to thermal neutrons. The time-of-flight (TOF) method was used for separating fast neutrons and γ -rays directly. The thermal neutrons were indirectly identified by the characteristic (478 keV) γ -rays from the 10 B ( n , α ) reactions and the corresponding thermal neutron fluxes were extracted by fitting the energy spectrum measured by the boron-loaded plastic scintillator in this work.