High-Resolution Penumbral Imaging of 14-MeV Neutrons

Yen-Wei CHEN  Noriaki MIYANAGA  Minoru UNEMOTO  Masanobu YAMANAKA  Tatsuhiko YAMANAKA  Sadao NAKAI  Tetsuo IGUCHI  Masaharu NAKAZAWA  Toshiyuki IIDA  Shinichi TAMURA 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics  Vol.E78-C  No.12  pp.1787-1792
Publication Date: 1995/12/20
Online ISSN: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Opto-Electronics
Keyword: 
penumbral imaging,  neutron image,  laser fusion,  toroidal aperture,  scintillator array,  gated image intensifier, 

Full Text: PDF(459.8KB)

Summary: 
We have developed a neutron imaging system based on the penumbral imaging technique. The system consists of a penumbral aperture and a sensitive neutron detector. The aperture was made from a thick (6 cm) tungsten block with a toroidal taper. It can effectively block 14-MeV neutrons and provide a satisfactory sharp, isoplanatic (space-invariant) point spread function (PSF). A two-dimensional scintillator array, which is coupled with a gated two-stage image intensifier system and a CCD camera, was used as a sensitive neutron detector. It can record the neutron image with high sensitivity and high signal-to-noise ratio. The reconstruction was performed with a Wiener filter. The spatial resolution of the reconstructed neutron image was estimated to be 31 µm by computer simulation. Experimental demonstration has been achieved by imaging 14-MeV deuterium-tritium neutrons emitted from a laser-imploded target.