Identifying thermal neutrons, fast neutrons, and gamma rays by using a scintillator-based time-of-flight method

An experiment based on a boron-loaded plastic scintillator as a neutron-sensitive media and a fast digital readout was implemented by means of time-of-flight method to distinguish γ-rays and fast neutrons as well as to thermal neutrons. The time-of-flight (TOF) method was used for separating fast neutrons and γ-rays directly. The thermal neutrons were indirectly identified by the characteristic (478 keV) γ-rays from the 1⁰ B(n , α) reactions and the corresponding thermal neutron fluxes were extracted by fitting the energy spectrum measured by the boron-loaded plastic scintillator in this work.