Digital pulse shape discrimination methods for n-γ separation in an EJ-301 liquid scintillation detector

A digital pulse shape discrimination system based on a programmable module NI-5772 has been established and tested with an EJ-301 liquid scintillation detector. The module was operated by running programs developed in Lab VIEW, with a sampling frequency up to 1.6 GS/s. Standard gamma sources22 Na,137Cs and60 Co were used to calibrate the EJ-301 liquid scintillation detector, and the gamma response function was obtained. Digital algorithms for the charge comparison method and zero-crossing method have been developed. The experimental results show that both digital signal processing(DSP) algorithms can discriminate neutrons from γ-rays. Moreover,the zero-crossing method shows better n-γ discrimination at 80 ke Vee and lower, whereas the charge comparison method gives better results at higher thresholds. In addition, the figure-of-merit(FOM) for detectors of two different dimensions were extracted at 9 energy thresholds, and it was found that the smaller detector presented better n-γseparation for fission neutrons.