Characteristics of boron-loaded plastic scintillators for neutron measurements

In this paper, we report investigations of the detector characteristics for boron-loaded plastic scintillators for neutron measurements. The detectors were tested with fast neutrons emitted from fission decays of a 5-μCi ²⁵²Cf source and with slow neutrons provided by the MC50 cyclotron at the Korea Institute of Radiological and Medical Science. The energy spectrum of the fast neutrons was obtained by applying a time-of-flight method to the coincident measurement of neutrons and gamma rays emitted from fission decays. The detectors were also tested to perform a pulse-timing analysis for fast neutrons, slow neutrons, and gammas to understand the scope of the discrimination for gamma rays when the detector is applied to practical measurements.