The 6th International Conference on Matter and Radiation at Extremes (ICMRE2023)

269 / 2023-04-23 22:10:21

Multi-channel Time-of-Flight Neutron Detection for Double Cone Ignition

Inertial Confinement Fusion Physics > Drivers, targets and diagnostics-I

Neutron time-of-flight (nTOF) detection has been applied to the deuterium-deuterium (DD) neutron production in Double-Cone Ignition (DCI) ¹ campaigns performed at the Shenguang-II Upgrade laser facility. The multi-channel nTOF system consists of fast-quenched liquid scintillator and three gated microchannel-plates photomultiplier tubes (MCP-PMT), which effectively mitigates the strong gamma-ray and photo-nuclear neutron backgrounds with the aid of single-line-of-sight collimator and lead shielding. The shielding effectiveness was evaluated with Monte-Carlo code GEANT4. Fusion DD neutrons were measured when fast electron beam was coupled to head-on colliding plasma at appropriate injection time. In comparison, no obvious neutron signal was detected in the case of no fast electron injection, which verifies the high efficiency of fast heating in DCI scheme.