The globally increased demand for helium-3 along with the limited
availability of this gas calls for the development of alternative technologies
for the large ESS instrumentation pool. We report on the CASCADE Project - a
novel detection system, which has been developed for the purposes of neutron
spin echo spectroscopy. It features 2D spatially resolved detection of thermal
neutrons at high rates. The CASCADE detector is composed of a stack of solid
boron-10 coated Gas Electron Multiplier foils, which serve both as a neutron
converter and as an amplifier for the primary ionization deposited in the
standard Argon-CO2 counting gas environment. This multi-layer setup efficiently
increases the detection efficiency and serves as a helium-3 alternative. It has
furthermore been possible to extract the signal of the charge traversing the
stack to identify the very thin conversion layer of about 1 micrometer. This
allows the precise determination of the time-of-flight, necessary for the
application in MIEZE spin echo techniques.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures. Submitted for publication in Journal of Physics:
Conference Series, Proceedings of the European Conference on Neutron
Scattering (ECNS2015
