Speaker
Description
Neutron resonance diagnosis technology has been developed worldwide for several decades. Most previous studies have used neutrons provided by large-scale particle accelerators. As a new approach to neutron generation, the Laser-Driven Neutron Source (LDNS) has been studied to obtain neutron pulses with the ultra-short pulse duration and high flux[1]. By setting a converter at downstream of the laser-accelerated ion source, the high energy ions generate neutrons with an yield up to ~10$^{11}$ within 1 ns via nuclear reactions such as $^9$Be(p, n)$^9$B and $^9$Be(d, n)$^{10}$B. By adding a moderator to the secondary target, the neutrons can be moderated to epithermal or lower energy (meV~eV), providing a new probability to achieve neutron resonance diagnosis with higher accuracy and smaller space. Therefore, many applications such as neutron imaging[2,3], radioactive experiments[4] and resonance spectroscopy[5] can be realized by LDNS.
In the experiment, the petawatt laser LFEX was used to shot a CD foil target as an ion acceleration source, and a cylindrical beryllium encased by a high-density polyethylene (HDP) moderator was used as the neutron source and moderator. We set a neutron beamline of 1.8m to measure the neutron resonance peaks around 4.28eV of a Ta plate which was heated to different temperatures to give an experimental evidence of isotope-discriminating nuclear thermometer using a single shot of LDNS. The experimental results and discussions will be introduced in the presentation.
This work was funded by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No. 25420911, No. 26246043, and No. 22H02007) of MEXT, A-STEP (AS2721002c), and PRESTO (JPMJPR15PD) commissioned by JST.
[1] Zechen Lan et al Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 64 (2022) 024001
[2] Akifumi Yogo et al Appl. Phys. Express 14 106001 (2021)
[3] Tianyun Wei et al AIP Advances 12, 045220 (2022)
[4] Takato Mori et al PHYSICAL REVIEW C 104, 015808 (2021)
[5] Akifumi Yogo et al, PHYSICAL REVIEW X 13, 011011 (2023)
