Beschreibung
We present a novel application of neutron volume detectors to be realized for the TOF neutron powder diffractometer POWTEX [1, 2]. This application leverages the detector’s additional depth dimension needed to reconstruct neutron trajectories and enhance analytic capabilities.
The key advantage lies in exploiting the extra spatial dimension in order to extract information about the origin of the scattering source within the experiment. While directly detecting the neutron’s path is not achievable, the volume detector allows us to statistically correlate multiple neutron events within its depth to a single neutron trajectory. That is to say that a neutron trajectory can be imagined as a collection of neutrons, all having undergone identical diffraction conditions and all behaving identically within experimental resolution.
The volume detector’s ability to capture events along the depth direction serves to correlate these events to the same neutron trajectory. This correlation also allows for distinguishing “good” neutrons (those following the expected diffraction pattern) from “bad” outliers.
By identifying and removing these outliers automatically, the volume detector significantly improves data quality. This translates into cleaner datasets and facilitates superior analysis, ultimately leading to deeper scientific insights in neutron powder diffraction experiments. Furthermore, it alleviates the burden on researchers by automating the removal of “bad” events, traditionally identified and removed by hand. This application is expected to enhance the data treatment and refinement, both for conventional and multi-dimensional approaches [3]. It may also hold potential for the entire neutron science community, offering researchers a powerful tool to unlock new avenues of analysis and discovery.
[1] Houben A., Schweika W., Brückel Th., Dronskowski R., Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 2012, 680, 124.
[2] Modzel G., Henske M., Houben A., Klein M., Köhli M., Lennert P., Meven M., Schmidt C. J., Schmidt U., Schweika W., Nucl. Instr. Meth. A 2014, 743, 90.
[3] Houben, A., Jacobs, P., Meinerzhagen, Y., Nachtigall, N., Dronskowski, R., J. Appl. Cryst. 2023, 56, 633–642.
