Baseline drift effect on the performance of neutron and gamma ray discrimination using frequency gradient analysis

TL;DR

This paper investigates how baseline drift affects neutron and gamma ray discrimination using frequency gradient analysis, emphasizing the importance of estimating and removing baseline shifts to enhance discrimination accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical and experimental analysis of baseline drift effects on FGA-based discrimination, proposing methods to estimate and mitigate this impact.

Findings

Baseline drift significantly affects FGA discrimination performance.

Estimating and removing baseline shifts improves discrimination accuracy.

Experimental results confirm the theoretical analysis.

Abstract

Frequency gradient analysis (FGA) effectively discriminates neutrons and gamma rays by examining the frequency-domain features of the photomultiplier tube anode signal. This approach is insensitive to noise but is inevitably affected by the baseline drift, similar to other pulse shape discrimination methods. The baseline drift effect is attributed to the factors such as power line fluctuation, dark current, noise disturbances, hum, and pulse tail in front-end electronics. This effect needs to be elucidated and quantified before the baseline shift can be estimated and removed from the captured signal. Therefore, the effect of baseline shift on the discrimination performance of neutrons and gamma rays with organic scintillation detectors using FGA is investigated in this paper. The relationship between the baseline shift and discrimination parameters of FGA is derived and verified by an experimental system consisting of an americium-beryllium source, a BC501A liquid scintillator detector, and a 5 GSPS 8-bit oscilloscope. Both theoretical and experimental results show that the estimation of the baseline shift is necessary, and the removal of baseline drift from the pulse shapes can improve the discrimination performance of FGA.