Neutron detection with water Cerenkov based detectors

Legitimate cross border trade involves the transport of an enormous number of cargo containers. Especially following the September 11 attacks, it has become an international priority to verify that these containers are not transporting Special Nuclear Material (SNM) without impeding legitimate trade. Fission events from SNM produce a number of neutrons and MeV-scale gammas correlated in time. The observation of consistent time correlations between neutrons and gammas emitted from a cargo container could, therefore, constitute a robust signature for SNM, since this time coincident signature stands out strongly against the higher rate of uncorrelated gamma-ray backgrounds from the local environment. We are developing a cost effective way to build very large neutron detectors for this purpose. We have recently completed the construction of two new water Cherenkov detectors, a 250 liter prototype and a new 4-ton detector. The 250-liter prototype uses an ultra-pure water detection medium doped with a small amount of gadolinium tri-chloride (0.2%). A 55 μCi 252Cf neutron source was placed at a distance of 1 meter from the detector behind a 2 inch thick wall of lead. The presence of the source is easily discernible from the background in both the uncorrelated count rate and the correlated one. The 4-ton detector will shortly undergo filling and testing