Neutron response of the LAMBDA spectrometer

Barium Fluoride (BaF2) is a very attractive scintillator material for gamma ray detection because of its very good timing property (a fast decay component of 0.6 ns) and high density (4.88 g/cc). Due to these properties, it could also be used potentially as neutron detectors by time of flight (TOF) technique. However, in recent past, they have only been employed to reject the neutron contamination by TOF in experiments measuring the high energy gamma rays. Instead of rejecting, the neutron energy spectrum can be simultaneously measured along with the high energy gamma rays to extract the inverse level density parameter for statistical model calculation. In general, the use of a neutron detector usually requires the knowledge of its intrinsic efficiency for neutron detection