Analysis of the BC501A neutron detector signals using the true pulse shape

A Digital Pulse Shape Analysis method has been developed and tested for a BC501A liquid scintillator. The method is of general use and is especially suited for measurements in high counting rate environments where particle discrimination is necessary. It consists of a single-parameter fit of the true pulse shape of the detector to the digitized signals and is based on very basic assumptions on the behavior of the detector signal. Thus, it can be extended to other detector types like inorganic scintillators and semiconductor detectors. The energy resolution, the quality of the particle discrimination and the efficiency for reconstructing pile-up events have been investigated with standard neutron and γ -ray sources using an 8 bit and 1 GSample/s digitizer.