Event-Mode Neutron Imaging Using the TPX3Cam - Breaking the Boundaries of Conventional Neutron Imaging Techniques

Abstract

Imaging using scintillators is a widespread and cost-effective approach in radiography. While different types of scintillator and sensor configurations exist, it can be stated that the detection efficiency and resolution of a scintillator-based system is strongly depended on the scintillator material and its thickness. Recently developed event-driven detectors are capable of observing spots of light emitted by the scintillator after a particle interaction, allowing to reconstruct the Center-of-Mass of the interaction on the scintillator surface. This results in a more precise location of the event and therefore provides a pathway to overcome the scintillator thickness limitation and increase the effective spatial resolution of the system. Utilizing this principle, we present a detector capable of Time-of-Flight imaging with a flexible field-of-view, ad-hoc binning and re-binning of data based on the requirements of the experiment including the possibility of particle discrimination via the analysis of the event shape in space and time. It is considered that this novel concept might replace regular cameras in neutron imaging detectors as it provides superior detection capabilities with the most recent results providing an increase by a factor 3 in image resolution and an increase by up to a factor of 7.5 in signal-to-noise for thermal neutron imaging.