Low-energy neutron measurements in an iron calorimeter structure irradiated by 200 GeV/c hadrons

Of serious concern in the design of detectors for the new high-luminosity hadron-hadron colliders are the radiation damage effects on silicon and other detectors of low-energy neutrons produced by spallation evaporation or fission processes. Because of the lack of experimental information on the number of neutrons with energies between 0.1 and 10 MeV in the cascades originating from high-energy hadrons, an experiment was carried out using activation detector techniques to measure the neutron fluence in a cascade initiated by 200 GeV hadrons in a calorimeter-like iron structure. It was found that at the maximum of the cascade one produces approximately 3 neutrons per GeV of incident energy: some 70% of these are of energies between 0.1 and 5 MeV, the remainder are fairly uniformly distributed in energy between 5 and several hundred MeV. The number of albedo neutrons leaving the front face of the calorimeter structure was about 0.3 neutrons per GeV of incident energy with in energy distribution similar to those at cascade maximum These data confirm that neutron-induced damage will he of concern in the design of detectors for the new colliders and that further measurements and calculations are necessary for a correct assessment of this damage. (author)