A Composite Method for Improving the Pulse Shape Discrimination Efficiency of a Scintillation Detector Using EJ-301 Liquid

This article presents a composite (COM) method to obtain the high-resolution pulse shape discrimination (PSD) for the neutron and gamma-ray pulses generated from scintillation detectors. The method, which is based on a selective combination of the digital charge integration (DCI) with the reference pulse method, aims to reduce the mixed radiation events in the low-energy range. An EJ-301 liquid scintillation detector together with a fast sampling analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is used to measure and digitize the pulses induced from the radioactive decays of 60 Co and 252 Cf, which are then analyzed by our COM method. The proposed method is evaluated using the figure of merit (FoM) and separation quality function F(u), and the results are compared with three known methods, namely the DCI, standard event fit (SEF), and artificial neural network (ANN) methods. We show that the average values of FoM and F(u) obtained within the COM method are about ten times higher than those obtained within the DCI and SEF in the whole energy range from 50 to 1000 keV electron equivalent (keVee). In particular, by using the COM method, the percentage of gamma events being confused as neutrons ranges from 0.32% to 8.80% when the energy is reduced from 400 to 50 keVee. This finding, which is significantly lower than those obtained by using the DCI and SEF, indicates that the proposed COM method should be considered as a leading method for producing a neutron/gamma PSD counter system with high resolution.