Bonn 2020 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 51: Poster (a)

HK 51.25: Poster

Thursday, April 2, 2020, 16:30–18:30, Zelt

Event identification electronics for low count-rate thermal neutron proportional counters — •Benjamin Brauneis¹, Jannis Weimar¹, Markus Köhli^1,2, and Ulrich Schmidt¹ — ¹Physikalisches Institut, Heidelberg University, Germany — ²Physikalisches Institut, University of Bonn, Germany

Thermal neutron proportional counters are used in low-count rate environments such as experimental halls for monitoring the beam luminosity or the cosmic-ray induced environmental radiation. However, in order to provide substantially good statistics, such instruments have to be large. This makes gaseous detectors susceptible to background like protons, (Compton) electrons, gammas, myons and nuclear fragments which are emitted from the wall material. Furthermore, due to the helium-3 crisis the baseline technology shifted towards boron-lined detectors, which have an energy spectrum continuously extended downwards to 0 eV. An event from thermal neutron conversion, however, can be distinguished from non-signal events by the drift time characteristics of the ionization track in the gas. Within the COSMIC Sense collaboration we are developing readout electronics for large-scale neutron detectors based on microcontrollers which act as digitizers as well as a triggered data acquisition. The frontend features a pulse-shape analysis for signal height and time over threshold including rise time discrimination using the built-in 10 bit analog-to-digital converter. We present the current status of the frontend electronics DAQ and measurements of the separation efficiency for this readout.