Antineutrino detection: An application for Pulse shape sensitive 6Li-doped plastic scintillator

One of the two detector material choices now being considered for the Mobile Antineutrino Demonstrator (MAD) project is
⁶
Li-doped pulse shape discriminating (PSD) plastic scintillator. This new material, manufactured by Eljen and designated EJ-299-50, continues the development of PSD plastic materials by the materials science group at LLNL, which invented PSD plastic in 2012. At present EJ-299-50 can be manufactured in multi-liter volumes with attenuation lengths approaching ~1 m. The MAD project is considering the use of this material in the form of 1 m long segments at 6 cm x 6 cm cross section. A 2D array of scintillator segments was shown to be an effective technique for above-ground reactor antineutrino detection by PROSPECT. For MAD, plastic material is considered a requirement for truly mobile above-ground detection systems suited to reactor monitoring for safeguards. In this presentation, we will summarize a set of key performance criteria, including attenuation length, stability, pulse shape sensitivity, and fast and slow neutron efficiency measurements and discuss how those performance criteria might translate to the overall performance of MAD.