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Adaptability of n–\(\upgamma\) discrimination and filtering methods based on plastic scintillation

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Abstract

Neutrons have been extensively used in many fields, such as nuclear physics, biology, geology, medical science, and national defense, owing to their unique penetration characteristics. Gamma rays are usually accompanied by the detection of neutrons. The capability to discriminate neutrons from gamma rays is important for evaluating plastic scintillator neutron detectors because similar pulse shapes are generated from both forms of radiation in the detection system. The pulse signals measured by plastic scintillators contain noise, which decreases the accuracy of n–\(\upgamma\) discrimination. To improve the performance of n–\(\upgamma\) discrimination, the noise of the pulse signals should be filtered before the n–\(\upgamma\) discrimination process. In this study, the influences of the Fourier transform, wavelet transform, moving-average filter, and Kalman algorithm on the charge comparison method, fractal spectrum method, and back-propagation neural network methods were studied. It was found that the Fourier transform filtering algorithm exhibits better adaptability to the charge comparison method than others, with an increasing accuracy of 6.87% compared to that without the filtering process. Meanwhile, the Kalman filter offers an improvement of 3.04% over the fractal spectrum method, and the adaptability of the moving-average filter in back-propagation neural network discrimination is better than that in other methods, with an increase in 8.48%. The Kalman filtering algorithm has a significant impact on the peak value of the pulse, reaching 4.49%, and it has an insignificant impact on the energy resolution of the spectrum measurement after discrimination.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chengdu University of Technology College of Engineering Technology, Leshan, 614000, Sichuan, China

    Zhuo Zuo, Hao-Ran Liu & Yu-Cheng Yan

  2. Southwest Institute of Physics, Chengdu, 610225, China

    Zhuo Zuo & Yu-Cheng Yan

  3. Chengdu University, Chengdu, 610106, China

    Bing-Qi Liu

  4. Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, 610225, China

    Song Zhang

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  1. Zhuo Zuo
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  2. Hao-Ran Liu
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  3. Yu-Cheng Yan
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  4. Bing-Qi Liu
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  5. Song Zhang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Zhuo Zuo, Hao-Ran Liu, Yu-Cheng Yan and Bing-Qi Liu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Zhuo Zuo and Song Zhang, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhuo Zuo.

Additional information

This work was supported by the Key Natural Science Projects of the Sichuan Education Department (No. 18ZA0067) and the Key Science and Technology Projects of Leshan (No. 19SZD117).

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Zuo, Z., Liu, HR., Yan, YC. et al. Adaptability of n–\(\upgamma\) discrimination and filtering methods based on plastic scintillation. NUCL SCI TECH 32, 28 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41365-021-00865-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41365-021-00865-3

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