Digital discrimination of neutron and γ ray using an organic scintillation detector based on wavelet transform modulus maximum

A novel algorithm for the discrimination of neutron and γ-ray events with wavelet transform modulus maximum (WTMM) in an organic scintillation has been investigated. Voltage pulses arising from a BC501A organic liquid scintillation detector in a mixed radiation field have been recorded with a fast digital sampling oscilloscope. The WTMM method using frequency-domain features exhibits a strong insensitivity to noise and can be used to discriminate neutron and γ-ray events based on their different asymptotic decay trend between the positive modulus maximum curve and the negative modulus maximum curve in the scale-space plane. This technique has been verified by the corresponding mixed-field data assessed by the time-of-flight (TOF) method and the charge comparison (CC) method. It is shown that the characterization of neutron and γ ray achieved by the discrimination method based on WTMM is consistent with that afforded by the TOF method and better than the CC method. Moreover, the WTMM method itself has presented its ability to eliminate the noise without any pretreatment to the pulses. (authors)