Elimination of ghosting artifacts from wavelength-shifting fiber neutron detectors.

Misassignment of neutron position (ghosting) produces artifacts which have been observed in wavelength-shifting (WLS) fiber detectors developed for time-of-flight (TOF) neutron powder diffraction. In position-sensitive detectors (PSDs) with WLS fiber encoding, thermal and cold neutrons interact with a monolithic 6LiF/ZnS:Ag scintillator screen, and scintillation photons are generated and transported through the crossed fibers to photomultipliers (PMTs). The neutron position is determined by photon counts in the PMTs within a preset time window. Ghosting occurs when neutrons hit the group boundaries of two neighboring PMTs for x-position multiplexing, which is modeled as resulting from a long travel length (about 3–5 mm) of a small number of scintillation photons. This model is supported by the change observed in aperture images when the threshold number for photon-pulses was adjusted for neutron event determination. When the threshold number of photon-pulses was set above 10 for each PMT, the ghost peaks ...