4 pi FOV compact Compton camera for nuclear material investigations

Abstract

A compact Compton camera with a 4 pi field of view (FOV) was manufactured using the design parameters optimized with the effective choice of gamma-ray interaction order determined from a Monte Carlo simulation. The camera consisted of six CsI(Na) planar scintillators with a pixelized structure that was coupled to position sensitive photomultiplier tubes (H8500) consisting of multiple anodes connected to custom-made circuits. The size of the scintillator and each pixel was 4.4 x 4.4 x 0.5 and 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.5 cm, respectively. The total size of each detection module was only 5 x 5 x 6 cm and the distance between the detector modules was approximately 10 cm to maximize the camera performance, as calculated by the simulation. Therefore, the camera is quite portable for examining nuclear materials in areas, such as harbors or nuclear power plants. The non-uniformity of the multi-anode PMTs was corrected using a novel readout circuit. Amplitude information of the signals from the electronics attached to the scintillator-coupled multi-anode PMTs was collected using a data acquisition board (cDAQ-9178), and the timing information was sent to a FPGA (SPARTAN3E). The FPGA picked the rising edges of the timing signals, and compared the edges of the signals from six detection modules to select the coincident signal from a Compton pair only. The output of the FPGA triggered the DAQ board to send the effective Compton events to a computer. The Compton image was reconstructed, and the performance of the 4 pi FOV Compact camera was examined. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.