Study of a new boron loaded plastic scintillator (revised)

Neutron detection research using plastic scintillators has recently led to instrument development for several applications and particularly for nuclear material characterization. In particular, plastic scintillators exhibit a fast time response and a high efficiency for fast neutrons spectrometry. The use of boron loaded plastic scintillators has been also proposed in order to reduce dead time for fission neutron coincidence counting. We report here on the study of a new and low-cost boron loaded plastic scintillator. Further, a simulation study was performed, including light production and transport in this kind of scintillator. Its characteristics have been measured in terms of light response, photon and neutron induced signals. An experiment has been carried out using the ion beam of a Van de Graaff accelerator at Saclay so as to determine the Birks parameters of the scintillators. These parameters were obtained for proton (between 1-2 MeV) and alpha particles (between 3.1 MeV and 5.4 MeV). The correlation between the experimental data and the simulation predictions has been studied for the neutron response of these scintillators. In addition, performances of this scintillator are compared with those of commercially available boron loaded plastic scintillator (BC454 from Bicron, Newbury, OH).