Preliminary results of a comparative study of fast scintillators for a thermal neutron activation landmine detector

The improved landmine detector system is a vehicle-mounted multi-sensor landmine detector which uses a thermal neutron activation (TNA) detector to confirm the presence of a mine by detecting the bulk nitrogen in its explosives. The input count rate to the TNA is very high and count rates of future systems could be an order of magnitude higher, allowing correspondingly higher sensitivity or shorter detection times for land mines. The chief bottleneck to achieving the maximum possible performance from the present TNA or a future system is the relatively slow fluorescent decay time of the NaI(Tl) scintillators which are currently used. This paper presents preliminary results from an experimental study into various fast scintillators as potential detector upgrades to the TNA confirmation detector, A number of fast, inorganic scintillators are compared with NaI(Tl) with respect to efficiency, energy resolution, available size and cost in the present application.