Accelerator-driven system (ADS) facilities world-wide opens new opportunities
for nuclear physics investigations, so that a high flux of neutrons through
spallation reactions can be produced at these facilities. It is known that the
measurement, continuous monitoring and optimization of the particle accelerator
beam intensity are among the most important actions in the operation of such
facilities. Considering this point of view, this paper presents a neutron/gamma
counter based on a micropixel avalanche photodiode (MAPD) and a plastic
scintillator that monitors the status of the accelerator-driven intense
resonance neutron source (IREN) facility by measuring the neutron-gamma
intensity in the target hall. The electronics of the modular neutron counter
has been designed and developed, including a bias voltage source (up to 130 V),
a preamplifier (36 gain) and discriminator (>10 mV) circuit. The last product
of MAPD (operation voltage- 55 V, PDE- 33 %, total number of pixels- 136900)
was used as a photon readout from a plastic scintillator. The sensitive area of
MAPD was 3.7*3.7 mm2 and the size of the plastic scintillator 3.7*3.7*30 mm3.
The measurement was carried out in the IREN target hall, where it was necessary
to monitor not only high neutron fluxes, but also gamma quanta. The
experimental results demonstrated a dependence between the count rate of the
detector and the frequency of the accelerator, which ranges from 2 to 50 Hz.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure