The CHErenkov / Scintillation Separation experiment (CHESS) has been used to demonstrate the separation of Cherenkov and scintillation light in both linear alkylbenzene (LAB) and LAB with 2g/L of PPO as a fluor (LAB/PPO). This is the first such demonstration for the more challenging LAB/PPO cocktail and improves on previous results for LAB. A time resolution of 338 +/- 12 ps FWHM results in an efficiency for identifying Cherenkov photons in LAB/PPO of 70 +/- 3% and 63 +/- 8% for time- and charge-based separation, respectively, with scintillation contamination of 36 +/- 5% and 38 +/- 4%. LAB/PPO data is consistent with a rise time of 0.75 +/- 0.25 ns.
A successfull application of Geiger-mode multipixel avalanche diodes (GMAPDs) for pulse-shape discrimination in alpha-beta spectrometry using organic liquid scintillator is described in this paper. Efficient discrimination of alpha and beta components in the emission of radioactive isotopes is achieved for alpha energies above 0.3 MeV. The ultra-compact design of the scintillating detector helps to efficiently suppress cosmic-ray and ambient radiation background. This approach allows construction of hand-held robust devices for monitoring of radioactive contamination in various environmental c…
Environmental radioactivity is a dominant background for rare decay search experiments, and it is difficult to completely remove such an impurity from detector vessels. We propose a scintillation balloon as the active vessel of a liquid scintillator in order to identify this undesirable radioactivity. According to our feasibility studies, the scintillation balloon enables the bismuth--polonium sequential decay to be tagged with a 99.7\% efficiency, assuming a KamLAND (Kamioka Liquid scintillator AntiNeutrino Detector)-type liquid scintillator detector. This tagging of sequential decay using al…
The SNO+ liquid scintillator experiment is under construction in the SNOLAB facility in Canada. The success of this experiment relies upon accurate characterization of the liquid scintillator, linear alkylbenzene (LAB). In this paper, scintillation decay times for alpha and electron excitations in LAB with 2 g/L PPO are presented for both oxygenated and deoxygenated solutions. While deoxygenation is expected to improve pulse shape discrimination in liquid scintillators, it is not commonly demonstrated in the literature. This paper shows that for linear alkylbenzene, deoxygenation improves disc…
Zinc tungstate (ZnWO$_4$) crystal scintillators are promising detection material for the experiments searching for double beta decay, dark matter, and investigating rare alpha decays. An extended R&D was performed to develop advanced quality ZnWO$_4$ crystal scintillators. The R&D programme included the selection of the initial materials, the variation of the compound stoichiometry, the application of single and double crystallization, and the annealing of the crystal boules. The optical transmittance of the produced boules was measured, and the luminescence under X-ray excitation in the tempe…
The ability to separately identify the Cherenkov and scintillation light components produced in scintillating mediums holds the potential for a major breakthrough in neutrino detection technology, allowing development of a large, low-threshold, directional detector with a broad physics program. The CHESS (CHErenkov / Scintillation Separation) experiment employs an innovative detector design with an array of small, fast photomultiplier tubes and state-of-the-art electronics to demonstrate the reconstruction of a Cherenkov ring in a scintillating medium based on photon hit time and detected phot…
This paper presents measurements of the scintillation light yield and time profile for a number of concentration of water-based liquid scintillator, formulated from linear alkylbenzene (LAB) and 2,5-diphenyloxazole (PPO). We find that the scintillation light yield is linear with the concentration of liquid scintillator in water between 1 and 10% with a slope of 127.9+-17.0 ph/MeV/concentration and an intercept value of 108.3+-51.0 ph/MeV, the latter being illustrative of non-linearities with concentration at values less than 1%. This is larger than expected from a simple extrapolation of the p…
This manuscript describes measurements of water-based liquid scintillators (WbLS), demonstrating separation of the Cherenkov and scintillation components using the fast timing response of a Large Area Picosecond Photodector (LAPPD). Additionally, the time profiles of three WbLS mixtures, defined by the relative fractions of scintillating compound, are characterized, with improved sensitivity to the scintillator rise-time. The measurements were made using both an LAPPD and a conventional photomultiplier tube (PMT). All samples were measured with an effective resolution O(100 ps), which allows f…
A liquid scintillator base experiment KamLAND-Zen has set a lower limit on neutrinoless double beta decay half-life, and upgrade project KamLAND-Zen 800 has started in 2019. Unfortunately, this project expects some backgrounds, and one of the main backgrounds is beta/gamma-ray from 214Bi in container of xenon loaded liquid scintillator (mini-balloon). In order to reject the background, we suggest using scintillation film for the future mini-balloon. If we can tag alpha-ray from 214Po by scintillation detection, we can eliminate 214Bi events by delayed coincidence analysis. Recently, it was rep…
The timing and spectral characteristics of four highly efficient, slow fluors are presented for liquid scintillator solutions using linear alkylbenzene (LAB) as the primary solvent. The mixtures exhibit high light yields, but with rise times of several ns or more and decay times on the order of tens of ns. Consequently, such liquid scintillator mixtures can be used for effective separation of Cherenkov and scintillation components based on timing in large scale liquid scintillation detectors. Such a separation, showing high light yield and directional information, is demonstrated here on a ben…
Molecular structure, electric property, and scintillation and quenching of liquid scintillators
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University（清华大学工程物理系）；Center for High Energy Physics, Tsinghua University（清华大学高能物理中心）；Key Laboratory of Particle & Radiation Imaging (Tsinghua University), Ministry of Education（教育部粒子与辐射成像重点实验室（清华大学））
We describe here measurements with a new device, the "dichroicon," a Winston-style light concentrator built out of dichroic reflectors, which could allow large-scale neutrino detectors to sort photons by wavelength with small overall light loss. Photon sorting would benefit large-scale water or ice Cherenkov detectors such as Hyper-Kamiokande or ICECUBE by providing a measure of dispersion, which in turn could allow improved position reconstruction and timing. For scintillator detectors like JUNO, upgrades to SNO+ or KamLAND-ZEN, or to water-based liquid scintillator detectors like Theia, dich…
Caesium iodide is one of the more extensively studied scintillators. Here we present X-ray luminescence spectra, scintillation light output and decay curves as function of temperature, from room temperature down to below 10 K. Features of the observed intrinsic luminescence are explained in terms of radiative recombination of on- and off-centre STE. A model permitting interpretation of the dynamics of luminescence changes in CsI with temperature is suggested. This model includes adiabatic potential energy surfaces (APES) associated with singlet and triplet states of self-trapped excitons (STE)…
The timing characteristics of scintillators must be understood in order to determine which applications they are appropriate for. Polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) and polyethylene teraphthalate (PET) are common plastics with uncommon scintillation properties. Here, we report the timing characteristics of PEN and PET, determined by exciting them with 120 GeV protons. The test beam was provided by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the scintillators were tested at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility. PEN and PET are found to have dominant decay constants of 34.91 ns and 6.78 ns, respectively.
Linear alkyl benzene (LAB) has in recent years been used as a solvent for PPO in large-scale scintillation detectors, like Daya Bay and SNO+. The combination has several nice properties, including high light yield, good materials compatibility, and excellent pulse shape discrimination. As charged particles move through the LAB+PPO, both Cherenkov and scintillation light are created. Separating Cherenkov from scintillation light would allow a broad range of physics in future large-scale detectors like THEIA, by allowing direction reconstruction with Cherenkov light while retaining the high ligh…
Applications that utilize scintillation detectors at low temperatures are growing in number. Many of these require materials with high light yield and a fast response. Here we report on the low-temperature characterisation of ZnSe doped with Al or Te, respectively. The X-ray luminescence and decay curves were measured over the 77- 295 K temperature range, and alpha particle excitation was used to examine scintillation light output and decay kinetics over the range 9-295 K. A significant improvement of the scintillation characteristics was observed at cooling below 100 K. The scintillation ligh…
For future MeV-scale neutrino experiments, a Cherenkov scintillation detector, CSD, is of particular interest for its capability to reconstruct both energy and direction for charged particles. A type of new target material, slow liquid scintillator, SlowLS, which can be used to separate Cherenkov and scintillation lights, is one of the options for the neutrino detectors. A multi-hundred ton spherical CSD is simulated using a Geant4-based Monte Carlo software, which handles the detailed the micro processes of MeV particles and optical photons and the functions for photomultiplier, PMT, and read…
A first comparison has been made between the pulse-shape discrimination characteristics of a novel $^{4}$He-based pressurized scintillation detector and a NE-213 liquid-scintillator reference detector using an Am/Be mixed-field neutron and gamma-ray source and a high-resolution scintillation-pulse digitizer. In particular, the capabilities of the two fast neutron detectors to discriminate between neutrons and gamma-rays were investigated. The NE-213 liquid-scintillator reference cell produced a wide range of scintillation-light yields in response to the gamma-ray field of the source. In stark …
This paper reports a series of measurements that characterize the directional dependence of the scintillation response of crystalline melt-grown and solution-grown stilbene to incident DT and DD neutrons. These measurements give the amplitude and pulse shape dependence on the proton recoil direction over one hemisphere of the crystal, confirming and extending previous results in the literature for melt-grown stilbene and providing the first measurements for solution-grown stilbene. In similar measurements of liquid and plastic detectors, no directional dependence was observed, confirming the h…
NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment with two functionally identical liquid scintillator tracking detectors, i.e. the Near Detector (ND) and the Far Detector (FD). One of NOvA's physics goal is to measure neutrino oscillation parameters by studying $ν_e$ appearance and $ν_μ$ disappearance with the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. An accurate light model is a prerequisite for precise charged particle energy estimation in the detectors. Particle energy is needed in event reconstruction and classification, both of which are cr…
Large liquid-scintillator-based detectors have proven to be exceptionally effective for low energy neutrino measurements due to their good energy resolution and scalability to large volumes. The addition of directional information using Cherenkov light and fast timing would enhance the scientific reach of these detectors, especially for searches for neutrino-less double-beta decay. In this paper, we develop a technique for extracting particle direction using the difference in arrival times for Cherenkov and scintillation light, and evaluate several detector advances in timing, photodetector sp…
The research of geoneutrino is a new interdisciplinary subject of particle experiments and geo-science. Potassium-40 ($^\text{40}$K) decays contribute roughly 1/3 of the radiogenic heat of the Earth, but it is still missing from the experimental observation. Solar neutrino experiments with liquid scintillators have observed uranium and thorium geoneutrinos and are the most promising in the low-background neutrino detection. In this article, we present the new concept of using liquid-scintillator Cherenkov detectors to detect the neutrino-electron elastic scattering process of $^\text{40}$K geo…
To separate scintillation and Cherenkov lights in water-based liquid scintillator detectors is a desired feature for future neutrino and proton decay researches. Linear alkyl benzene (LAB) is one important ingredient of a water-based liquid scintillator being developed. In this paper we observed a good separation of scintillation and Cherenkov lights in an LAB sample. The rising and decay times of the scintillation light of the LAB were measured to be $(7.7\pm3.0)\ \rm{ns}$ and $(36.6\pm2.4)\ \rm{ns}$, respectively, while the full width [-3$σ$, 3$σ$] of the Cherenkov light was 12 ns dominated …
The Atomic Spectroscopy and Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons (ASACUSA) experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) facility of CERN constructed segmented scintillators to detect and track the charged pions which emerge from antiproton annihilations in a future superconducting radiofrequency Paul trap for antiprotons. A system of 541 cast and extruded scintillator bars were arranged in 11 detector modules which provided a spatial resolution of 17 mm. Green wavelength-shifting fibers were embedded in the scintillators, and read out by silicon photomultipliers which had a sensitive area of 1 x…
High light collection efficiency is an important requirement in any application of scintillation detectors. The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility for improving this parameter in cryogenic scintillation bolometers, which can be considered as a promising detectors in experiments investigating neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter. Energy resolutions and relative pulse amplitudes of scintillation detectors using ZnWO4 scintillation crystals of different shapes (cylinder 20 mm in dimater by 20 mm and hexagonal prism with diagonal 20 mm and height 20 mm), reflector ma…
The response of the liquid scintillator (EJ-301 equivalent to NE-213) to the monoenergetic electrons produced in Compton scattered $γ$-ray tagging has been carried out for various radioactive $γ$-ray sources. The measured electron response is found to be linear up to $\sim$4~MeVee and the resolution of the liquid scintillator at 1~MeVee is observed to be $\sim$~11\%. The pulse shape discrimination and pulse height response of the liquid scintillator for neutrons has been measured using $^7$Li(p,n$_1$)$^7$Be*(0.429 MeV) reaction. Non linear response to mono-energetic neutrons for the liquid sci…
The proton light yield of organic scintillators has been measured extensively in recent years using fast waveform digitizers and large discrepancies exist in the values reported by different authors. In this letter, we address principles of digital signal processing that must be considered when conducting scintillator light yield measurements. Digitized waveform pulse height values are only proportional to the amount of scintillation light if the temporal shape of the scintillation pulse is independent of the amount of energy deposited. This is not the case for scintillation pulses resulting f…
A light-yield calibration of an NE 213A organic liquid scintillator detector has been performed using both monoenergetic and polyenergetic gamma-ray sources. Scintillation light was detected in a photomultiplier tube, and the corresponding pulses were subjected to waveform digitization on an event-by-event basis. The resulting Compton edges have been analyzed using a Geant4 simulation of the detector which models both the interactions of the ionizing radiation as well as the transport of scintillation photons. The simulation is calibrated and also compared to well-established prescriptions use…
Organic liquid scintillators are used in a wide variety of applications in experimental nuclear and particle physics. Boron-loaded scintillators are particularly useful for detecting neutron captures, due to the high thermal neutron capture cross section of $^{10}$B. These scintillators are commonly used in neutron detectors, including the DarkSide-50 neutron veto, where the neutron may produce a signal when it scatters off protons in the scintillator or when it captures on $^{10}$B. Reconstructing the energy of these recoils is complicated by scintillation quenching. Understanding how nuclear…
Scintillators are employed for particle detection and identification using light-pulse shapes and light quenching factors. We developed a comprehensive model describing the light generation and quenching in CaWO$_4$ single crystals used for direct dark matter search. All observed particle-dependent light-emission characteristics can be explained quantitatively, light-quenching factors and light-pulse shapes are calculated on a microscopic basis. This model can be extended to other scintillators such as inorganic crystal scintillators, liquid noble gases or organic liquid scintillators.
Simulations of photon propagation in scintillation detectors were performed with the aim to find the optimal scintillator geometry, surface treatment, and shape of external reflector in order to achieve maximum light collection efficiency for detector configurations that avoid direct optical coupling, a situation that is commonly found in cryogenic scintillating bolometers in experimental searches for double beta decay and dark matter. To evaluate the light collection efficiency of various geometrical configurations we used the ZEMAX ray-tracing software. It was found that scintillators in the…
The construction of large-scale liquid scintillator detectors is complicated by the need to separate the scintillation region from photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) due to their intrinsic radioactivity. This is generally done using acrylic or nylon barriers, whose own activity can also lead to substantial reduction of the fiducial detection volume for a number of low energy (MeV) studies, and whose construction becomes increasingly difficult and expensive for larger detector volumes. Here we present an initial simulation study of an alternative geometric construction known as SLIPS (Stratified LIqu…
Liquid scintillator detectors are widely used in modern neutrino studies. The unique optical properties of semiconducting nanocrystals, known as quantum dots, offer intriguing possibilities for improving standard liquid scintillator, especially when combined with new photodetection technology. Quantum dots also provide a means to dope scintillator with candidate isotopes for neutrinoless double beta decay searches. In this work, the first studies of the scintillation properties of quantum-dot-doped liquid scintillator using both UV light and radioactive sources are presented.
This paper presents studies of the performance of water-based liquid scintillator in both 1-kt and 50-kt detectors. Performance is evaluated in comparison to both pure water Cherenkov detectors and a nominal model for pure scintillator detectors. Performance metrics include energy, vertex, and angular resolution, along with a metric for ability to separate the Cherenkov from the scintillation signal, as being representative of various particle identification capabilities that depend on the Cherenkov / scintillation ratio. We also modify the time profile of scintillation light to study the same…
Neutron veto detector based on liquid scintillator containing hydrogen atoms is an integral part of any underground experiment for dark matter search. So far, a flammable mixture of liquid hydrocarbons was used as a liquid scintillator in such detectors. A safe alternative might be a liquid scintillator based on liquid argon doped with methane. In this work, we have studied the primary scintillations in pure liquid argon and its mixtures with methane, the CH4 content varying from 100 ppm to 5%. The primary scintillations have for the first time been observed in liquid argon doped with methane,…
Bombardment of materials by high-energy particles (e.g., electrons, nuclei, X- and $γ$-ray photons) often leads to light emission, known generally as scintillation. Scintillation is ubiquitous and enjoys widespread applications in many areas such as medical imaging, X-ray non-destructive inspection, night vision, electron microscopy, and high-energy particle detectors. A large body of research focuses on finding new materials optimized for brighter, faster, and more controlled scintillation. Here, we develop a fundamentally different approach based on integrating nanophotonic structures into s…
The response of a NE-213 liquid-scintillator detector has been measured using tagged neutrons from 2--6 MeV originating from an Am/Be neutron source. The neutron energies were determined using the time-of-flight technique. Pulse-shape discrimination was employed to discern between gamma-rays and neutrons. The behavior of both the fast (35 ns) and the combined fast and slow (475 ns) components of the neutron scintillation-light pulses were studied. Three different prescriptions were used to relate the neutron maximum energy-transfer edges to the corresponding recoil-proton scintillation-light y…
The use of 40Ca100MoO in experimental searches for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νDBD) relies on knowledge of fundamental scintillation properties of the material. In this work we determine the absolute light yield of calcium molybdate using Monte-Carlo refractive index matching technique (MCRIM). The MCRIM technique is a combination of experiment and simulations that allows the absolute light yield of scintillators to be determined by taking into account effects of refraction, scattering and absorption in the material. The light collection efficiency of the scintillator-detector assembly w…
The scintillation anisotropy effect for proton recoil events has been investigated in five pure organic crystalline materials: anthracene, trans-stilbene, p-terphenyl, bibenzyl, and diphenylacetylene. These measurements include characterization of the scintillation response for one hemisphere of proton recoil directions in each crystal. In addition to standard measurements of the total light output and pulse shape at each angle, the prompt and delayed light anisotropies are analyzed, allowing for investigation of the singlet and triplet molecular excitation behaviors independently. This work p…
The possibility of measuring the 85Kr activity with a liquid scintillation spectrometer (LSS) by registering the scintillations in krypton was investigated. It was found that at partial pressure of krypton less than atmospheric, the conversion efficiency of krypton scintillators amounts to 3 keV/photon and is 20 times lower than the conversion efficiency of liquid scintillators. The amplitude of the pulses due to scintillations in krypton is approximately equal to the amplitude of the pulses from Cherenkov radiation which occurs in the walls of the vial under the influence of 85Kr beta particl…
We developed a 12-liter volume neutron detector filled with the liquid scintillator EJ301 that measures neutrons in an underground laboratory where dark matter and neutrino experiments are located. The detector target is a cylindrical volume coated on the inside with reflective paint (95% reflectivity) that significantly increases the detector's light collection. We demonstrate several calibration techniques using point sources and cosmic-ray muons for energies up to 20 MeV for this large liquid scintillation detector. Neutron-gamma separation using pulse shape discrimination with a few MeV ne…
Detection of supernova relic neutrinos could provide key support for our current understanding of stellar and cosmological evolution, and precise measurements of these neutrinos could yield novel insights into the universe. In this paper, we studied the detection potential of supernova relic neutrinos using linear alkyl benzene (LAB) as a slow liquid scintillator. The linear alkyl benzene features good separation of Cherenkov and scintillation lights, thereby providing a new route for particle identification. We further addressed key issues in current experiments, including (1) the charged cur…
A construction of a thermal neutron testing detector with a thin [ZnS(Ag)+$^6$LiF] scintillator is described. Results of an investigation of sources of the detector pulse origin and the pulse features in a ground and underground conditions are presented. Measurements of the scintillator own background, registration efficiency and a neutron flux at different objects of the BNO INR RAS were performed. The results are compared with the ones measured by the $^3$He proportional counter.
The scope of this article is to understand the role of radiative losses in detector energy scale at energies of 5-100 MeV and to estimate the non-linear effect they produce in large liquid scintillator and Cherenkov detectors. For this purpose the generalized energy scale detector model was constructed and the detector response was simulated by means of toy Monte Carlo simulations. It was found that the non-linearity grows proportionally to a relative fraction of the Cherenkov light into the total light yield achieving the maximum for pure water Cherenkov detectors. The effect generally increa…
The possibility of using the effect of full energy absorption in a light scintillator when an electron beam passes through it to determine the energy characteristics of a low and medium energy beam (the absorbed energy method) is experimentally presented. The energy calibration of the quasi-monochromatic electron beam of the Pakhra accelerator of the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences using scintillation detectors with a thickness of 14.5, 20, 23.5 and 51.2 cm was performed. For electron beam energies up to about 100 MeV and scintillation detector thicknesses f…
Low counting experiments (search for double $β$ decay and dark matter particles, measurements of neutrino fluxes from different sources, search for hypothetical nuclear and subnuclear processes, low background $α$, $β$, $γ$ spectrometry) require extremely low background of a detector. Scintillators are widely used to search for rare events both as conventional scintillation detectors and as cryogenic scintillating bolometers. Radioactive contamination of a scintillation material plays a key role to reach low level of background. Origin and nature of radioactive contamination of scintillators, …
A multi-cell He gas-scintillator active target, designed for the measurement of photoreaction cross sections, is described. The target has four main chambers, giving an overall thickness of 0.103 $\mathrm{g/cm^{2}}$ at an operating pressure of 2 MPa. Scintillations are read out by photomultiplier tubes and the addition of small amounts of $\mathrm{N}_{2}$ to the He, to shift the scintillation emission from UV to visible, is discussed. First results of measurements at the MAX IV Laboratory tagged-photon facility show that the target has good timing resolution and can cope well with a high-flux …
The FlatDot detector has been used to demonstrate the separation of Cherenkov and scintillation light for 1 to 2MeV electrons in linear alkylbenzene (LAB). With an average PMT transit time spread (TTS) of 200ps, the early light in each event is clearly dominated by the Cherenkov signal, which on average comprises $86^{+2}_{-3}\%$ of the light collected in the first 4.1ns of each event. The spatial distributions of the Cherenkov and scintillation light are found to match those predicted in Monte Carlo simulations. This is a key step towards demonstrating direction reconstruction of $β$ decays, …
Water-based liquid scintillators (WbLS) present an attractive target medium for large-scale detectors with the ability to enhance the separation of Cherenkov and scintillation signals from a single target. This work characterizes the scintillation properties of WbLS samples based on LAB/PPO liquid scintillator (LS). X-ray luminescence spectra, decay profiles, and relative light yields are measured for WbLS of varying LS concentration as well as for pure LS with a range of PPO concentrations up to 90 g/L. The scintillation properties of the WbLS are related to the precursor LAB/PPO: starting fr…
We present a technique for separating double beta-decay from $^8$B solar neutrino interactions in a liquid scintillator detector. The technique uses position and time of photo-electrons (PEs) to separate directional Cherenkov light from isotropic sintillation light in the reconstruction of the kinematics of candidate events. Here we introduce a Cherenkov-scintillation space time boundary defined as the light cone in the 2-dimensional space of the arrival time and the polar angle of each PE with respect to the axis from the center of the detector to the vertex. The PEs located near the boundary…
A new type of neutron detector, named Stack Structure Solid organic Scintillator (S$^4$), consisting of multi-layer plastic scintillators with capability to suppress low-energy $γ$ rays under high-counting rate has been constructed and tested. To achieve $\it{n}$-$γ$ discrimination, we exploit the difference in the ranges of the secondary charged particles produced by the interactions of neutrons and $γ$ rays in the scintillator material. The thickness of a plastic scintillator layer was determined based on the results of Monte Carlo simulations using the Geant4 toolkit. With layer thicknesses…
