The HOmogeneous Thermal NEutron Source (HOTNES) is a new type of thermal
neutron irradiation assembly developed by the ENEA-INFN collaboration. The
facility is fully characterized in terms of neutron field and dosimetric
quantities, by either computational and experimental methods. This paper
reports the results of the first "HOTNES users program", carried out in 2016,
and covering a variety of thermal neutron active detectors such as
scintillators, solid-state, single crystal diamond and gaseous detectors
