Image reconstruction of a neutron scatter camera

Recently, Sandia Laboratories developed a neutron scatter camera to detect special nuclear materials. This camera exhibits the following advantages: high efficiency, direction discrimination, neutron-gamma discrimination ability, and wide field of view. However, using the direct projection method, the angular resolution of this camera is limited by uncertainties in the energies estimated from pulse height and time of flight measurements. In this study, we established an eight-element neutron scatter camera and conducted the experiment with a²⁵²Cf neutron source. The results show that it has an angular resolution better than 8° (1σ) and a detection efficiency of approximately 2.6×10^-4. Using maximum likelihood expectation maximization method, the image artifact was eliminated, and the angular resolution was improved. We proposed an average scattering angle method to estimate the scattering energy of neutrons and Compton gamma rays. As such, we can obtain a recognizable image and energy spectrum of the source with some degradation of energy and image resolutions. Finally, a newly measured light response function based on the MPD-4 device was used for image reconstruction. Although we did not obtain a better result than that of the standard light response function, we have observed the effects of light response function on image reconstruction.