Efficiency limitation of thin film coated planar semiconductor thermal neutron detector

Semiconductor thermal neutron detectors are increasingly been used in in-core thermal neutron flux measurements in nuclear reactors. One limitation of these detectors is that they suffer from low detection efficiency. In this work, the maximum efficiency of a planar structure thermal neutron detector was determined using two widely used computer codes: Geant4 and MCNP6. Diamond and SiC are used as based materials in this work because of their large electron-hole pair production efficiency which generally translates to high detection efficiency. The electron-hole pair production efficiency is the fraction of energy that goes into electron-hole pair creation and depends on the band-gap energy and the W-values. These two materials are also not susceptible to radiation damage which makes them suitable for high radiation environments such as nuclear reactors. Thermal neutron detection is achieved using ¹⁰B and ⁶LiF conversion layers coated on the surface of the detector. The maximum efficiency for ¹⁰B conversion layer was achieved at a thickness of 2 μm. The efficiency at this thickness is 5.57 ± 0.09% and 5.49±0.09% for diamond and silicon carbide, respectively. When ⁶LiF was used as a thermal neutron conversion layer, the maximum thickness of the conversion layer was determined to occur at 17 μm. The efficiency at this thickness is 5.47 ±0.06% and 5.38±0.06% for diamond and SiC, respectively.