Use of the Boron-Loaded Liquid Scintillator BC-523A for the Detection of Special Nuclear Material

The BC-523A detector is a boron-10-loaded liquid scintillation detector that is sensitive to not only fast neutrons and gamma rays, but also to thermal neutrons. This detector has recently attracted the attention of several researchers and has shown promise for neutron spectroscopy. Several efforts have been made to accurately characterize this detector for several neutron and gamma-ray energies. In this paper, we show, for the first time, that neutron capture pulses can be distinguished from neutron and gamma-ray scattering pulses by using an offline digital pulse shape discrimination method based on charge integration. In addition, new Monte Carlo simulation and measurement results for time to capture are compared and very good agreement is achieved. This work has applications in fields such as nuclear safeguards, nuclear nonproliferation, and national security.