Development of a pulse-width-discriminating 3He position-sensitive detector system

In many neutron scattering experiments, 3 He-gas position-sensitive detectors (PSDs) are employed to obtain high-quality data. However, the exact position where a neutron is detected cannot be determined if two or more neutrons are simultaneously captured at different positions. This results in noise and degrades the quality of the data. In particular, such noise is a serious source of spurious scattering in inelastic neutron scattering instruments equipped with a large number of long PSDs recently developed at pulsed neutron sources. Herein, we introduce a pulse-width-discriminating PSD system that monitors the pulse width and height of the collected data. The system utilizes previously developed neutron-readout boards and removes instances of two or more simultaneous captures from the data to significantly improve the performance of PSDs. We also propose a new program to monitor the pulse width from PSD data using a hardware function implemented for other purposes. We confirm that the noise decreases to a level almost equal to that of the background. Although the developed program is applied to an inelastic scattering experiment, it is applicable to other types of experiments in which mispositioned signals should be eliminated as noise.