Neutron focusing optic for submillimeter materials analysis

Abstract

A neutron lens constructed with polycapillary glass fibers is used to focus a 50×45 mm2 beam exiting a cold neutron guide onto a spot of 0.53 mm (full width at half maximum) with a current density gain of 80. The characteristics of the lens are presented. This lens is designed to enhance the detection limit and lateral resolution for prompt gamma activation analysis using cold neutron beams.

Focusing Polycapillary Optics and Their Applications

“…Neutron beams can also be focused by polycapillary optics [110][111][112]. A focused neutron beam could be used in boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT), based on the selective delivery of a boronated pharmaceutical to cancerous tissue followed by irradiation with thermal neutrons [113][114][115].…”

Neutron Fibres: Confined Propagation and Focusing of Neutrons in the Micron Range and Residual Stress Analysis

“…Converging lenses, made by polycapillary fibres, enabled to focus cold neutrons to perform materials analysis [18,19]. Small neutron beams can be used to determine strain distributions or phase distributions in metals (for instance, at welds) in small volumes [20,21].…”

Polycapillary focusing optic for small-sample neutron crystallography

“…In previous work, polycapillary optic focusing of cold neutrons has been shown to be effective, giving intensity gains of nearly 100 times and spot sizes of $500 mm (Chen et al, 1992;Xiao et al, 1994). Furthermore, focusing optics for convergent-beam X-ray crystallography (with convergence up to 3 ) has been shown to be effective with resolution <2 A Ê for protein crystals with lattice constants up to 70 A Ê (Owens et al, 1996;Hofmann et al, 2001;Huang, 2001;Huang et al, 2002).…”