Neutron Radiography with Inorganic Scintillation Detectors

We propose here to evaluate a variety of inorganic scintillators, including sodium iodide and bismuth germanate, for use in energy-sensitive neutron detectors. We will couple these crystals to photomultiplier tubes and measure the prompt response to inelastic neutron reactions with the scintillator atoms. To unfold the incident neutron energy distribution from the resulting signal pulse heights, we will employ our differential filter method. With fast neutrons traversing carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen targets, we will investigate our differential filter's ability to resolve resonant absorption bands in these total neutron cross sections. Photon energies up to ~9 MeV have been obtained with a resolution of ~100 keV in a sodium iodide detector using our approach. Thus, encouraged that we will be able to resolve at least one resonant absorption band in each of these elements, we will test our method using explosive simulants.