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Study of boron neutron capture therapy used neutron source with protons bombarding a thick 9 Be target
Author(s) -
Yue Gang,
Chen Jinxiang,
Song Ruixia
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.597984
Subject(s) - beryllium , neutron , proton , neutron source , spectral line , nuclear physics , atomic physics , neutron capture , neutron temperature , nuclear reaction , boron , time of flight , beam (structure) , spectrometer , physics , bonner sphere , neutron cross section , materials science , optics , astronomy
Neutron sources created by 4‐, 3.5‐, and 3‐MeV protons striking a thick beryllium target were studied via the time‐of‐flight technique. Protons were accelerated by the Peking University 4.5 MV electrostatic accelerator. Two disk‐shaped9 Be targets with thickness 1.5 and 3 mm were used in the measurements. The time‐of‐flight spectra were observed at zero degrees with respect to the incident proton beam. The analysis to these time‐of‐flight spectra is given. The time‐of‐flight spectra were converted to the energy spectra and compared to a neutron spectrum of7 Li ( p , n ) 7 Be reaction with incident energy 2.5 MeV, which was also measured in this work. Restricted by the spectrometer itself, the threshold of the measurements is 400 keV. The results show that by using several MeV protons bombarding a thick beryllium target, reactions other than9 Be ( p , n ) 9 B produce significant contributions to the neutron yield with energy less than 1 MeV.