A novel algorithm for the discrimination of neutron and {gamma}-ray with wavelet transform modulus maximum (WTMM) in an organic scintillation has been investigated. Voltage pulses arising from a BC501A organic liquid scintillation detector in a mixed radiation field have been recorded with a fast digital sampling oscilloscope. The performances of most pulse shape discrimination methods in scintillation detection systems using time-domain features of the pulses are affected intensively by noise. However, the WTMM method using frequency-domain features exhibits a strong insensitivity to noise and can be used to discriminate neutron and {gamma}-ray events based on their different asymptotic decay trend between the positive modulus maximum curve and the negative modulus maximum curve in the scale-space plane. This technique has been verified by the corresponding mixed-field data assessed by the time-of-flight (TOF) method and the frequency gradient analysis (FGA) method. It is shown that the characterization of neutron and gamma achieved by the discrimination method based on WTMM is consistent with that afforded by TOF and better than FGA. Moreover, because the WTMM method is it self presented to eliminate the noise, there is no need to make any pretreatment for the pulses.
Download