Investigation of Large LGB Detectors for Antineutrino Detection

A detector material or configuration that can provide an unambiguous indication of neutron capture can sub-stantially reduce random coincidence backgrounds in antineutrino detection and capture-gated neutron spectrome-try applications. Here we investigate the performance of such a material, a composite of plastic scintillator and 6Linat6 Gd( 10BO3)3:Ce (LGB) crystal shards of ≈ 1 mm dimension and comprising 1 % of the detector by mass. While it is found that the optical propagation properties of this material as currently fabricated are only marginally acceptable for antineutrino detection, its neutron capture identification ability is encouraging