Demonstration of a solid deuterium source of ultra-cold neutrons
Abstract
Ultra-cold neutrons (UCN), neutrons with energies low enough to be confined by the Fermi potential in material bottles, are playing an increasing role in measurements of fundamental properties of the neutron. The ability to manipulate UCN with material guides and bottles, magnetic fields, and gravity can lead to experiments with lower systematic errors than have been obtained in experiments with cold neutron beams. The UCN densities provided by existing reactor sources limit these experiments. The promise of much higher densities from solid deuterium sources has led to proposed facilities coupled to both reactor and spallation neutron sources. In this paper we report on the performance of a prototype spallation neutron-driven solid deuterium source. This source produced bottled UCN densities of 145 +/-7 UCN/cm3, about three times greater than the largest bottled UCN densities previously reported. These results indicate that a production UCN source with substantially higher densities should be possible.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.nucl-ex/0312021,
title = {Demonstration of a solid deuterium source of ultra-cold neutrons},
author = {A. Saunders and J. M. Anaya and T. J. Bowles and B. W. Filippone and P. Geltenbort and R. E. Hill and M. Hino and S. Hoedl and G. E. Hogan and T. M. Ito and K. W. Jones and T. Kawai and K. Kirch and S. K. Lamoreaux and C. -Y. Liu and M. Makela and L. J. Marek and J. W. Martin and C. L. Morris and R. N. Mortensen and A. Pichlmaier and S. J. Seestrom and A. Serebrov and D. Smith and W. Teasdale and B. Tipton and R. B. Vogelaar and A. R. Young and J. Yuan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:nucl-ex/0312021},
year = {2008}
}