Year
2019
Abstract
The Single Volume Scatter Camera (SVSC) Collaboration is multi-institution effort led by Sandia National Laboratories to develop portable neutron imaging systems for a variety of applications in non-proliferation and arms control. Current state-of-the-art kinematic neutron imaging systems consist of distributed scintillator volumes in which the position, time, and energy of multiple interactions are used to reconstruct a neutron’s incoming direction. Such systems suffer from poor geometrical efficiency and are ultimately limited in performance by the size of the individual scintillator cells. The SVSC project aims to improve the geometrical efficiency by up to an order magnitude by reconstructing multiple neutron interactions within the same scintillator volume. The corresponding size reduction also enables closer inspection, further improving detection rates. In addition, the imaging performance is no longer limited by the size of individual cells, but by how well two interactions in the volume can be reconstructed: component-level improvements such as improved light output of the scintillator or timing properties of the photo-detector could lead to overall imaging performance improvements without a full-scale re-design of the system. Several detector design concepts are being explored with different methods to reconstruct the trajectory. These include a single scintillator volume with high photo-detector coverage in which interaction positions would be reconstructed using the position and arrival times of detected photons: this design concept requires excellent single photon timing resolution. A second design concept is the optically segmented approach in which only one spatial position along the bar needs to be reconstructed. Finally, a coded aperture mask could be used to reconstruct the interaction positions. Each of these concepts are undergoing rapid development paths in parallel. The concept, overall program goals, and current progress up to date will be presented.