Search

The parameters are assessed of a detector designed to record nucleon decay and/or the oscillations of a neutron bound in the atomic nucleus by detecting multiple neutron emission events in massive samples. Calculations have been carried out for the detection efficiency and for the spatial distribution of the points at which the single neutrons emitted from a point source had to be detected, for different variants of the detector geometry. To evaluate the background characteristics of the detector, calculations have been performed for the multiplicities and spatial distributions of the points of formation of secondary neutrons occurring in the interactions of 0.3–1 GeV nucleons with infinite lead units. It is shown that the comparison of the spatial distribution of the points of neutron detection for nucleon decay or the neutron oscillation phenomena and the background processes allows one to suppress the cosmic-ray background of the detector by a factor of more than 10.