The nELBE time of flight facility

The nELBE time of flight facility has become operational at the ELBE superconducting linear accelerator at Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. The commissioning started with a beamtime in November 2007 and again in February 2008. With a short flight path of approximately 5 m a 100 kHz repetition rate of the electron beam was used to measure neutron time of flight in the energy range of 0.1 – 10 MeV. The electron beam energy was 25, and 33 MeV with 1-5 A of average electron current. The electron beam intensity was kept low to allow in-beam single particle counting.
The beam profile of neutrons and photons was determined with two plastic scintillators mounted on a translation stage. The neutron time of flight spectrum was determined with plastic scintillators with a low detection threshold of ca. 25 keV and with a 235-U fission chamber from PTB, which also allowed to measure the absolute neutron fluence and estimate the background of low energy neutrons. The transmission of the electron beam line was optimized to reduce the bremsstrahlung background not coming from the photo-neutron source. First transmission measurements of total neutron cross sections were made.
Beam time at nELBE is available as of now and all potential users are invited to submit proposals for experiments. TAA funding through EFNUDAT can be provided.