Comparative study of the pulse shape discrimination (PSD) performance of fast neutron detectors

Certain scintillating materials are sensitive to both gamma and neutron radiation and can give information about the type of interacting radiation due to differences in the light output response. By collecting the light pulses and converting them to electrical signals the nature of the radiation can be determined by measuring the amount of electrical charge in the pulse tail - for neutrons, the pulses are longer, with more charge in the tail than for the shorter gamma pulses. This determination called Pulse Shape Discrimination (PSD) can nowadays be performed in real-time onboard digitisers during data collection. In this work several detectors (EJ301, EJ309 liquids; EJ299-33 plastic and p-terphenyl scintillators) of various shapes and sizes were connected to several digital Data Acquisition (DAQ) systems as well as the established digital / analogue hybrid Mesytec MPD8 / MADC-32 set up in a comparative study. The aim of the campaign was to produce a Figures of Merit (FOM) for the PSD performance of the various detector / DAQ combinations to give relative performance estimates of the CAEN V1751 10-bit 1 GSample/s digitiser in comparison with other DAQ solutions within a near-standardised experimental environment. It is likely that the DAQ set ups were not equivalent as significant differences in the matching of the detector outputs to the dynamic range of the digitisers were observed - however, with the configurations used in this campaign the CAEN V1751 digitiser showed superior FOM values to the Struck SiS3320, Bridgeport usbBase and Mesytec MPD-8 DAQ systems tested. Furthermore, there seemed little difference between the FOM from the faster but lower voltage resolution (1 GSample/s with 10 bits) CAEN V1751 compared to the slower but higher resolution (250 MSample/s with 12 bits) CAEN N6720 digitiser for this application.