A high-efficiency thermal neutron detector based on thin 3D (B4C)-B-10 converters for high-rate applications

new position-sensitive thermal neutron detector based on boron-coated converters has been developed as an alternative to todays standard He-3-based technology for application to thermal neutron scattering. The key element of the development is a novel 3D (B4C)-B-10 converter which has been ad hoc designed and realized with the aim of combining a high neutron conversion probability via the B-10(n, alpha)(7) Li reaction together with an efficient collection of the produced charged particles. The developed 3D converter is composed of thin aluminium grids made by a micro-waterjet technique and coated on both sides with a thin layer of( 10)B(4)C. When coupled to a GEM detector this converter allows reaching neutron detection efficiencies close to 50% at neutron wavelengths equal to 4 angstrom. In addition, the new detector features a spatial resolution of about 5 min and can sustain counting rates well in excess of 1 MHz/cm(2). The newly developed neutron detector will enable time-resolved measurements of different kind of samples in neutron scattering experiments at high flux spallation sources and can find a use in applications where large areas and custom geometries of thermal neutron detectors are foreseen. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2018