The Efficiency of Thermal Neutron Detection and Collimation With Microchannel Plates of Square and Circular Geometry.

Detectors with microchannel plates (MCPs) are currently widely used in photon and charged particle detection with high spatial (∼10 μm) and temporal (<0.5 ns) resolution. All the advances in MCP detection technologies can be successfully implemented for the detection of thermal neutrons by using MCPs manufactured from a modified glass mixture doped with neutron absorbing atoms. In this paper, we compare the efficiency of thermal neutron detection for two standard MCP geometries: circular-pore and square-pore MCPs doped with the 10B isotope. The results of our modeling indicate that the detection of thermal neutrons with a square-pore MCP is 11%-23% more efficient than for the circular geometry, and can be higher than 70% for the existing MCP technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]