Liquid Organic Scintillator Detectors for Nuclear Material Monitoring

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Engineering/Physics, 2009-10

Liaison(s): Steven Dazeley PhD, Gregory Keefer PhD, Nathaniel Bowden PhD, Adam Bernstein PhD
Advisor(s): Richard Haskell
Students(s): Roger Billingsley, Chen Lim, Steven Ning (PHY), Alex Steinkamp (TL-PHY), Yoichi Sagawa

The joint Physics-Engineering project sponsored by LLNL aims to research a potential liquid organic scintillator for use in an antineutrino detector. Such a detector must have neutron-gamma discrimination capabilities, and the HMC team will test those capabilities for various cell dimensions and reflectivity levels. The team will also investigate the relative efficacy of two different algorithms for discriminating between neutron and gamma events. The result of the team’s research will inform the direction of LLNL’s next antineutrino detector.