Preliminary Assessment of the Effectiveness of the Neutron Shield

For these two plots I used the runs involving Cf-252 with and without the neutron shield:

(07110605_1630-07110604_2234) Cf-252 with neutron shield

(07110604_1343-07110603_2047) Cf-252 with neutron shield

(07110603_1004-07110603_0418) Cf-252 and Am-241

(07110602_0822-07110601_2104) Cf-252 and Am-241

(07110601_1017-07110531_2205) Cf-252 and Am-241

Cuts applied: Chi Squared, Q Inner, Symmetric

These cuts excluded the outliers and eliminated most of the events due to Am-241 in the non-shielded runs.

The plot of yield versus phonon energy shows that the runs with no neutron shield have slightly more low-yield events at low phonon energies than the runs with the neutron shield. The histogram shows the difference more clearly as the runs with the neutron shield have noticeably fewer low-yield events than the runs without it, indicating the effectiveness of the shield. The difference between runs with and without the neutron shield is not extreme, however, and this could be because the energy threshold is too high.