P. L. Mulligan, L. R. Cao,a) and D. Turkoglu
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Nuclear Engineering Program, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA
Abstract
Neutron depth profiling (NDP) is a mature, nondestructive technique used to characterize the concentration of certain light isotopes in a material as a function of depth by measuring the residual energy of charged particles in neutron induced reactions. Historically, NDP has been performed using a single detector, resulting in low intrinsic detection efficiency, and limiting the technique largely to high flux research reactors. In this work, we describe a new NDP instrument design with higher detection efficiency by way of spectrum summing across multiple detectors. Such a design is capable of acquiring a statistically significant charged particle spectrum at facilities limited in neutron flux and operation time.
