  Over the last decades, the field of thermal neutron detection has
overwhelmingly employed He-3-based technologies. The He-3 crisis together with
the forthcoming establishment of the European Spallation Source have
necessitated the development of new technologies for neutron detection. Today,
several promising He-3-free candidates are under detailed study and need to be
validated. This validation process is in general long and expensive. The study
of detector prototypes using neutron-emitting radioactive sources is a
cost-effective solution, especially for preliminary investigations. That said,
neutron-emitting sources have the general disadvantage of broad, structured,
emitted-neutron energy ranges. Further, the emitted neutrons often compete with
unwanted backgrounds of gamma-rays, alpha-particles, and fission-fragments. By
blending experimental infrastructure such as shielding to provide particle
beams with neutron-detection techniques such as tagging, disadvantages may be
converted into advantages. In particular, a technique known as tagging involves
exploiting the mixed-field generally associated with a neutron-emitting source
to determine neutron time-of-flight and thus energy on an event-by-event basis.
This allows for the definition of low-cost, precision neutron beams. The
Source-Testing Facility, located at Lund University in Sweden and operated by
the SONNIG Group of the Division of Nuclear Physics, was developed for just
such low-cost studies. Precision tagged-neutron beams derived from radioactive
sources are available around-the-clock for advanced detector diagnostic
studies. Neutron measurements performed at the Source Testing Facility are thus
cost-effective and have a very low barrier for entry. In this paper, we present
an overview of the project.
