DESCANT and β-delayed neutron measurements at TRIUMF

¹ Department of Physics, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1, Canada
² Departments of Chemistry and Physics & Astronomy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0055, USA
³ TRIUMF, Vancouver, BC, V6T 2A3, Canada
⁴ Dèpartement de physique, Universitè de Montrèal, PO Box 6128, Montrèal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada
⁵ Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines, 1500 Illinois St., Golden, CO 80401, USA
⁶ Department of Physics, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD 21402-5026, USA
⁷ Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB4 1JT, UK
⁸ Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, 22607 Hamburg, Germany
⁹ Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, Mumbai 400 085, India
¹⁰ National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1321, USA

^a e-mail: vbildste@uoguelph.ca

Published online: 28 May 2015

Abstract

The DESCANT array (Deuterated Scintillator Array for Neutron Tagging) consists of up to 70 detectors, each filled with approximately 2 liters of deuterated benzene. This scintillator material o_ers pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities to distinguish between neutrons and γ-rays interacting with the scintillator material. In addition, the anisotropic nature of n – d scattering allows for the determination of the neutron energy spectrum directly from the pulse height spectrum, complementing the traditional time-of-flight (ToF) information. DESCANT can be coupled either to the TIGRESS (TRIUMF-ISAC Gamma-Ray Escape Suppressed Spectrometer) γ-ray spectrometer [1] located in the ISAC-II [2] hall of TRIUMF for in-beam experiments, or to the GRIFFIN (Gamma-Ray Infrastructure For Fundamental Investigations of Nuclei) γ-ray spectrometer [3] located in the ISAC-I hall of TRIUMF for decay spectroscopy experiments.