Polysiloxane scintillators for next-generation nuclear material verification

With new designs for full-scale and small modular reactors emerging as solutions to new power demands, there is a need for modern, reliable tools for nuclear material verification. This application requires innovative detectors that are sensitive to multiple species of ionizing radiation, radiation-hard, and can withstand realistic environmental conditions. Due to their Si-O backbone, scintillators based on a polysiloxane matrix are innately radiation-hardened, temperature-insensitive, and physically robust. This talk presents the recent achievements in improving these scintillators with modified B10-enriched molecules to enable three-particle detection and machine learning-enabled triple-particle discrimination for the application of active interrogation of special nuclear material.