Beam monitoring and evaluation are very important to boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT), and a variety of detectors have been developed for these applications. However, most of the detectors used in BNCT only have a small detection area, leading to the inconvenience of the full-scale 2-D measurement of the beam. Based on micromegas technology, we designed a neutron detector with large detection area and high counting rate. This detector has a detection area of 288 mm multiples 288 mm and can measure thermal, epithermal, and fast neutrons with different detector settings. The BNCT experiments demonstrated that this detector has a very good 2-D imaging performance for the thermal, epithermal, fast neutron and gamma components, a highest counting rate of 94 kHz/channel, and a good linearity response to the beam power. Additionally, the flux fraction of each component can be calculated based on the measurement results. The Am-Be neutron source experiment indicates that this detector has a spatial resolution of approximately 1.4 mm, meeting the requirements of applications in BNCT. It is evident that this micromegas-based neutron detector with a large area and high counting rate capability has great development prospects in BNCT beam monitoring and evaluation applications.
@article{arxiv.2304.03595,
title = {A large area, high counting rate micromegas-based neutron detector for BNCT},
author = {Zhujun Fang and Zhiyong Zhang and Bin Shi and Wei Jiang and Xianke Liu and Siqi He and Jun Chen and Ping Cao and Jianbei Liu and Yi Zhou and Ming Shao and Botian Qu and Shufeng Zhang and Qian Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.03595},
year = {2023}
}