Neural neutron/gamma discrimination in organic scintillators for fusion applications

This work deals with the discrimination of neutrons and gamma rays on the basis of their different pulse shapes in scintillator detectors; this technique is widely employed in nuclear fusion applications. After a thorough phase of data analysis, a multi layer perceptron (MLP) is trained with the aim of processing the shape of light pulses produced by these ionizing particles in an organic liquid scintillator and digitally acquired. Moreover, fast-superimposed events (called pile-ups) are detected and a further MLP is trained to analyze them and recover the original superimposed events. Satisfactory experimental results were obtained at the Frascati Tokamak Upgrade, ENEA-Frascati, Italy.