Neutron spectrometer on a pulsed Van-de-Graaf accelerator

A neutron time-of-flight spectrometer is described, developed on the basis of a pulsed electrostatic accelerator (PEA). The main spectrometer components are: a capacitance-=. type sensor, a system of beam shaping and deviation, a target, neutron detectors and a multichannel registration scheme. PEA permits to obtain pulses of accelerated protons with 3 mA amplitude and 1.5 ns duration at pulse frequency of 2MHz. Stilbene scintillation detectors which can be placed both within the measuring room and outside it behing the 1m thick wall, are used as neutron detectors. For improvement of background conditions the walls within the room are lined by boron polyethylene. The multichannel registration scheme is designed according to module principle and contains a pulse shaper, a discriminator, a time-amplitude converter, an analyzer and a division block of the analyzer address. The total spectrometer time resolution for neutrons with the energy of 4 - 17 MeV does not surpass 2,3 ns