Development of a CCD based thermal neutron imaging detector for the Israeli Research Reactor IRR-1 at Soreq NRC

Abstract Among the imaging systems used for thermal neutron imaging worldwide, the most prevalent configuration is CCD camera based. At facilities with sufficiently high neutron flux (>1  ×  106 n/cm2/sec), the basic design does not necessitate amplification of scintillation photons prior to their registration by the CCD camera. However, for high resolution imaging at low flux reactors, insufficient amount of scintillation photons may reach each CCD pixel, thus, photon statistics becomes the limiting factor over neutron statistics. As described in this work, introduction of an image-intensifier into the system’s optical chain removed photon statistics limitation, allowed fine focus adjustments and improved image quality. This led to the possibility of performing good quality tomographic scans.