Investigating new analysis methods for neutron multiplicity identification

Neutron detectors are important to accurately determine the number of free neutrons emitted from nuclear collisions. The Texas A&M 4π neutron ball can observe and detect neutrons from in-beam experiments in a large geometric range of neutrons. Several examples of the importance of this capability are characterizing the violence of a collision or tracking the NZ equilibration during a collision. For much of its 30-year history, the neutron ball utilized analog electronics which limited the detection capabilities because of the inherently simple assumptions for determining neutron multiplicities that were implicit as a result. Recently, the neutron ball scintillator fluid was replaced, and the electronics were upgraded to employ waveform digitizers to read the photomultiplier tubes. Studying the waveforms presents an opportunity to better understand the performance of the neutron ball and potentially identify neutrons that were previously unaccounted for. The resulting capture time and probability distributions from the study of these waveforms will be shown.