Abstract
The effect of uncertainty in chopper phasing (jitter) has been investigated for the high-resolution time-of-flight spectrometer LET at the ISIS second target station. The investigation is carried out using virtual experiments, with the neutron simulation package McStas, where the chopper jitter is found to cause a Lorentzian tail in the resolution function. We find that jitter even up to the unrealistically high value of 2 μs can be tolerated without any noticeable degradation of resolution or incident intensity. The results are supported by simple analytical estimates and are believed to be general for chopper spectrometers.