Pulsed Neutron Monitoring at High Energy Electron Accelerators with Silver Lined Proportional Counter

Abstract

Pulsed laser deposition with simultaneous in situ real-time monitoring of optical spectroscopic ellipsometry and reflection high-energy electron diffraction Rev. Sci. Instrum. 84, 043902 (2013); 10.1063/1.4798621 Novel fast-neutron activation counter for high repetition rate measurements Rev. Sci. Instrum. 77, 10E713 (2006); 10.1063/1.2227442Thin-window high-efficiency position sensitive proportional counter for the vacuum flat crystal spectrometers on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory electron beam ion trap (abstract) Rev. Sci.Abstract. To meet the challenging requirement of pulsed neutron background measurement, which is present around electron accelerators at the Indus-1 facility of the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT) Indore, a silver lined proportional counter with 0.2cps/n cm -2 s -1 thermal neutron sensitivity has been developed. The detector has been tested for its performance in continuous thermal neutron field at Apsara reactor and in pulsed neutron field at Indus-1 facility. The detector shows ±11% signal linearity at various reactor powers and follows the silver decay scheme during reactor scram experiment. Off-line measurements made in pulsed neutron background at the Indus-1 facility compare well with nuclear track detectors (CR-39). For monitoring on-line neutron flux, electronic gating circuit was used that can switch off the scalar counter unit during the prompt X-ray response of the detector taking trigger pulse from the accelerator and experiments showed that the neutron flux measured by the detector is in close agreement with CR-39 values.