Development of a new optical-based quasi-digital particle discrimination technique using inorganic scintillators

In this study, we propose an original approach for particle discrimination in a mixed radiation field using scintillators. The method relies on the possibility to identify the point of interaction in a phoswich detector from the emission spectra of the produced scintillation light, using optical filters as passive selectors. As a proof of concept, we developed a compact prototype thermal neutron active dosimeter for mixed neutron/gamma fields. The detector was characterized in terms of energy calibration, neutron efficiency and gamma rejection. The obtained results show that more than the 99% of counts due to gamma rays are rejected if the color discrimination is employed, thus demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed approach to be used in radiation detection.