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Our Research into the mini Time Cube

Mini Time Cube (mTC), a scintillator based detector, will be used to determine the anti-neutrino spectra of reactors, and it will first be tested at the NIST research reactor. mTC is incorporating technology to improve signal directionality and to reduce detector size; mTC is a 2.2 liter solid plastic scintillator cube ( EJ-254 0.2% natural 10B doped) surrounded by micro-channel plate photomultiplier tubes(MCP PMT's) with SCROD electronics that allow for extremely fast (100ps) time resolution. The 100ps time resolution permits spatial analysis on the centimeter scale. The cube will be positioned < 10m from the reactor to receive the most anti-neutrinos possible, however the small size of the mTC will constrain the number of anti-neutrino events to a few per day. Some problems with such a close proximity to the reactor are: the mTC will receive a high reactor neutron and γ flux which must be attenuated; the neutrons and γ will mimic part of the signal from neutrinos. The current design for the shielding has layers of steel shot suspended in wax, borated polyethylene, steel, and lithiated polyethylene to shield the mTC from the reactor neutrons, and γ rays. The UMD team have been working on the shielding calculations in MCNP and design of the shielding cave in autoCAD.

Publications

The mini Time Cube is a work is progress and there are currently no publications for this project. We look forward to publishing several works on the involved topics in the very near future.