Investigation of thermal neutron detection efficiency of Boron Carbide converter material using GEANT4 simulation for different types of detector configurations

Abstract

Abstract A lot of advancement in the field of semiconductors has made it possible to design a solid state neutron detector. They are small in size and compact, have economical bulk fabrications, require low power for their operation. Hence it can act as a plausible alternative to traditional neutron detector such as gas filled and scintillation detectors. It has been observed that many factors like the choice of converter material, LLD settings and geometrical configurations have an impact on the thermal neutron detection efficiency of solid state neutron detector design. Therefore in the present research work, a systematic GEANT4 simulation have been performed on estimating the simulated thermal neutron detection efficiency (η) for five different solid state detector geometrical configurations design with Boron Carbide (10B4C) as a converter material. These detectors geometry configurations designs are planar, rectangular parallel trenches, cylindrical perforation, stack and spherical (single and multi-layer). The objective of the simulations was to obtain critical geometrical features for which the efficiency reaches the maximum value, of the given detector configurations. The influence of the different enrichment levels of 10B (20% to 80%) in Boron Carbide and different Low-Level Discriminator (LLD) value setting (from 100 keV to 700 keV) on the simulated thermal neutron detection efficiency was also investigated. Finally, the simulated multi channel analyzer spectra or in other words histoplots were obtained for all the detector configurations.