CODED APERTURE THERMAL NEUTRON CAMERA WITH ASIC-BASED PAD READOUT

A new generation of coded aperture neutron imagers is being developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The detector of the camera is a position sensitive thermal neutron chamber. The new device is a 3He-filled ionization chamber, which uses only anode and cathode planes. The anode is composed of an array of individual pads. The charge is collected on each of the individual 5 × 5 mm2 anode pads, (48 × 48 in total corresponding to a 24 × 24 cm2 sensitive area) and read out by application specific integrated circuits. The new design has several advantages for the field of coded aperture applications compared to the previous generation of wire-grid based neutron detectors. Among these are the rugged design, lighter weight and use of non-flammable stopping gas. The pad-based readout is event by event, thus capable of high count rates, and can perform data analysis and imaging on an event by event basis. The spatial resolution of the detector can be better than the pixel size by using charge sharing between adjacent pads. In this paper, we will report on the development and performance of the new, prototype pad-based neutron camera and present the first pad-based coded aperture images of thermalized neutron sources.