Research Of Waveform Digitizing Technology For Neutron Detection

Nuclear energy has the advantage of abundant resources and economy, and is the main energy source of the future. Accelerator Driven Sub-critical Systemcan transmutatethe nuclear waste as raw materia of nuclear energy. Soit has important significance to solve the safe disposal of nuclear waste and stable nuclear fuel supply stability. In the ADS system, detecting the intensity of the neutron which is producedby the spallation and fission reactions is a key issue. The accuracy of theneutrondetection directly determines the performance of nuclear reaction controlling. Neutron detectors need to discriminatethe neutron out ofthe y photons by measuring the time-of-flight and the pulse shape. For satisfying the physical requirements of high precision, high integration density and minimum cost, we have developed the waveform digitizing technology that acquires the data of electric charge, time-to-flight and pulse fall time in single read-out process. The waveform digitizing technology is based on high-speed switched capacitor array (SCA) chip named DRS4that allows sample an interested region of analog signal up to a rate of5GSPS. Together with the DRS4module, the front-end module and the trigger module are designed to build a waveform digitizing system. Beside, the zero-delay trigger technology is developed, which makes the trigger module can provide the trigger decision of a low and fixed latency for the instant waveform sampling.Thispaper introduces the hardware and software development of the waveform digitizing technology in detail, and the n-ydiscrimination ability and trigger performance aretested by the experiment.