Identification of Leakage Spectra from Neutron Activation in Glass/Cherenkov Detectors - Paper 96
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a new detector system concept that can be deployed in major US cities to identify the leakage spectrum of a nuclear weapon detonation. The detector is based on a small piece of glass that has been doped with an element that has a high activation cross section and creates a radioactive activation product with a reasonable length half-life. The decay of the activation product(s) after exposure creates Cherenkov light which can propagate to a photomultiplier and can be turned into a count-rate signal. The signal from each glass in each detector in a city can be individually analyzed to determine the amount of activation products produced in the initial exposure. Several activation products can be determined in a single glass if the half-lives are not the same. With a known source location and a detailed 3D model of a city, neutron transport simulations can be made by using a library of known sources to predict the activation amounts each source would have made in the glass detectors. A simple comparison of the measured activation amounts and the predicted activation amounts can identify the source spectrum contained in the library that is the best match. Choosing dopants with a large range in the threshold energy for the activation reactions can help to differentiate the spectra in the library. The method of matching the measured activation amounts to the predicted activation amounts to identify the source spectrum is similar to the analysis used for the passive Activation Foil Integrated Detector System (AFIDS), also developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In AFIDS, wires or foils of known mass and isotopic composition are deployed before and then collected after exposure. Counting gammas in a nearby laboratory determines the activation amounts. The glass/Cherenkov system is active - it uses a battery-powered detector to count flashes of Cherenkov light and to communicate its count rates to a remote location for further analysis. Work has been performed in several areas, including glass making, automated detection and communication systems and software tools for analysis of the signal and source spectrum identification. Bell and Boatner have developed phosphate glasses that incorporate elements with high capture cross sections, and Hayward has simulated the response with Geant4 and measured the response with isotopic gamma sources. This paper will focus on the software tools for determining the activation amounts from the Cherenkov count-rate signal and finding the best matching source spectrum. A test problem in an urban environment is used to demonstrate the potential of a spectrum identification system using neutron activation. The analysis methods developed to identify the neutron leakage spectra from Cherenkov light given off by neutron activation in doped glasses work well. The calculation used to unfold the count-rate information into the number of actual activation products uses robust algorithms that can also compute associated uncertainties. These uncertainties and the known uncertainties of the glass tube material compositions are incorporated into the matching analysis to determine which of the source spectra in the library best matches the measured activation data. Any measurement method used to identify a neutron source spectrum relies at some point on a comparison against known sources; no identification method is definitive. Detection systems measure some physical aspect of the source, not its serial number. Many systems measure the physical aspect to determine that the source has some property, and then leave it to experts to determine which potential sources share that property. The analysis system presented here incorporates the comparison into the analysis itself. The statistical tests show which of the known library sources match the measured data the best and whether that match is a good match. If the best match still does not fit the measured data well (a very high χ{sup 2} value), that indicates the true source is not one of the sources in the library. This is still valuable information for decision makers. (authors)