Calibration and operation of a neutron time-of-flight scintillator array on Nova

The Tion diagnostic is a 1020-channel scintillator array on the Nova laser at Livermore. It measures the arrival time of single D-D or D-T neutrons at 27 m from the target with time resolution of 4 ns. The effect of neutron scattering has been obtained from Monte-Carlo neutron transport simulations and the scattered response is convolved with a Gaussian source to fit the data. The data analysis has been checked using targets which produce roughly equal numbers of D-T and D-D counts. The temperature obtained from Tion and from a current-mode neutron time-of-flight detector are in agreement for neutron yields above 1 × 109.