Development of a multi-channel power supply for silicon photo-multipliers used with inorganic scintillators
Otari Javakhishvili, Irakli Keshelashvili, David Mchedlishvili, Mikael Gagoshidze, Tanja Hahnraths, Andro Kacharava, Zaza Metreveli, Fabian Mueller, Thomas Sefz… 展开作者
Otari Javakhishvili, Irakli Keshelashvili, David Mchedlishvili, Mikael Gagoshidze, Tanja Hahnraths, Andro Kacharava, Zaza Metreveli, Fabian Mueller, Thomas Sefzick, Dimitri ShergelaShvili, Helmut Soltner, Hans Stroeher
The motivation of the current R&D project is based upon the requirements of the JEDI international collaboration aiming to measure Electric Dipole Moments (EDMs) of charged particles in storage rings. One of the most important elements of such an experiment will be a specially designed polarimeter with the detection system based on a modular inorganic scintillator (LYSO crystal) calorimeter. The calorimeter modules are read out by Silicon Photo Multipliers (SiPMs). This paper describes the development of a multi-channel power supply for the polarimeter modules, providing very stable and clean bias voltages for SiPMs. In order to ensure the best possible performance of SiPMs in conjunction with the crystal-based calorimeter modules and to guarantee the required level of calorimeter stability, several quality requirements have to be met by the power supply. Additionally, it is required to provide features including remote control via the network, ramping of the output voltage, measuring and sending the information about its output voltages and currents, etc. The obtained results demonstrate that the goals for the JEDI polarimeter are met. The developed hardware will be useful in other fields of fundamental and applied research, medical diagnostic techniques and industry, where SiPMs are used.
Inorganic scintillators are widely used for scientific, industrial and medical applications. The development of 3D printing with inorganic scintillators would allow fast creation of detector prototypes for registration of ionizing radiation, such as alpha and beta, gamma particles in thin layers of active material and soft X-ray radiation. This article reports on the technical work and scientific achievements that aimed at developing a new inorganic scintillation filament to be used for the 3D printing of composite scintillator materials: study and definition of the scintillator composition; d…
Future HEP experiments at the energy and intensity frontiers present stringent challenges to inorganic scintillators in radiation tolerance, ultrafast time response and cost. This paper reports recent progress in radiation hard, ultrafast, and cost-effective inorganic scintillators for future HEP experiments. Examples are LYSO crystals for a precision time of flight detector, LuAG ceramics for an ultracompact, radiation hard shashlik sampling calorimeter, BaF2:Y crystals for an ultrafast calorimeter, and cost-effective scintillators for a homogeneous hadron calorimeter. Applications for Gigahe…
Research in ceramic scintillators has steadily progressed alongside the research in bulk single crystal scintillator growth. As interest in faster scintillation material production with lower cost increases, more research on scintillating ceramics is needed. Research targeting optimization of optically transparent ceramics that can rival bulk-grown crystals grown may lower cost, increase yield, increase volume, and improve energy resolution in applications and systems currently using sodium iodide and alike. Ceramic scintillators that are dense (>5 g/cm3), have high effective Z (>60), are brig…
Investigated in this work are sensitivities to non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) of a prototype detector placed about 20 meters away from the Spallation Neutron Source at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in two years of data taking. The presumed prototype consists of 10 kg undoped CsI scintillation crystals directly coupled with SiPM arrays operated at 77 K. Compared to the COHERENT CsI(Na) detector, a much higher light yield is assumed for the prototype. An experiment with a cylindrical undoped CsI crystal coupled directly to a photomultiplier tube at about 77 K was conducted to verif…
A novel geometry for a sampling calorimeter employing inorganic scintillators as an active medium is presented. To overcome the mechanical challenges of construction, an innovative light collection geometry has been pioneered, that minimises the complexity of construction. First test results are presented, demonstrating a successful signal extraction. The geometry consists of a sampling calorimeter with passive absorber layers interleaved with layers of an active medium made of inorganic scintillating crystals. Wavelength-shifting (WLS) fibres run along the four long, chamfered edges of the st…
$Cs_2LiYCl_6:Ce^{3+}$ (CLYC) is an inorganic scintillator that has recently garnered attention for its ability to detect and discriminate between gammas and thermal neutrons. We investigate several important performance parameters of three different solid state photomultipliers (SSPMs) when reading out CLYC crystals: linearity, energy resolution, and pulse shape and discrimination ability. These performance parameters are assessed at a variety of temperatures between -20$^{\circ}$C and +50$^{\circ}$C.
Data on the photon nonproportional response of 33 inorganic scintillation materials are systemized and analyzed. The main trends of nonproportionality for different groups of inorganic scintillators, especially for oxides and halides, are highlighted. The dependence of the shape and degree of photon nonproportional response versus chemical composition, dopant type, refractive index and other fundamental properties of the materials is studied. Better proportionality appears to be correlated with higher refractive index of the compound. Another related factor is the width of the valence band in …
Future HEP experiments present stringent challenges to inorganic scintillators in both fast timing response and radiation tolerance. This paper reports recent progress in developing ultrafast inorganic scintillators with sub-ns decay time for future precision timing detectors and high-rate experiments. Performance of fast and ultrafast crystals with mass production capability are compared to CsI crystals which are used for the Mu2e calorimeter. Examples are LYSO:Ce, BaF2 and BaF2:Y, which are considered for Mu2e-II. Crystal radiation hardness against gamma-rays and hadrons is reported. Current…
Hadrons emerging from high-energy collisions, as it is the case for protons and pions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, can produce a damage to inorganic crystals that is specific and cumulative. The mechanism is well understood as due to bulk damage from fragments caused by fission. In this paper, the existing experimental evidence for lead tungstate, LYSO and cerium fluoride is summarised, a study using FLUKA simulations is described and its results are discussed and compared to measurements. The outcome corroborates the confidence in the predictive power of such simulations applied to inor…
In recent years, demand for scintillation detectors with high time resolution (better than 100 ps) has emerged in high-energy physics and medical imaging applications. In particular, time of flight positron emission tomography (TOF-PET) can greatly benefit from increasing time resolution of scintillators, which leads to the increase of signal-to-noise ratio, decrease of patient dose, and achievement of the superior spatial resolution of PET images. Currently, extensive research of various types of materials is carried out to achieve the best time resolution. In this review, the recent progress…
The scintillating properties of active materials used in high energy and particle physics experiments play an important role regarding the performances of both calorimeters and experiments. Two scintillator materials, a scintillating glass and an inorganic crystals were examined to be used for collider experiments showing good optical and scintillating properties. This paper discusses the simulated performances of two materials of interest assembled in a scintillator-photodetector combination. The computational study was carried out with Geant4 simulation program to determine energy resolution…
IRADCAL: A Monolithic Inorganic Scintillator And Thin Scintillators To Measure Low Energy Electron, Proton And Heavy Ion Albedo Spectrums From Lunar Surface
The possibility to use a mini-phoswich detector to identify ions in the region of Z ~ 10 is explored in the framework of the NUMEN project. The NUMEN program, aimed at the investigation of the nuclear matrix elements connected to the neutrinoless double beta decay by means of double charge exchange nuclear reactions, foresees very high fluencies, which prevent the use of standard silicon as stop detectors. The need of reasonable radiation hardness, together with a total energy resolution around 2% and a high granularity, makes scintillators possible candidates. Promising results are obtained u…
We summarize the recent activity of our group in the calibration, monitoring and gain stabilization of photodetectors, primarily silicon photomultipliers, in calorimeters using scintillator as active medium. The task originally solved for the CALICE analog hadron calorimeter founds application in other experiments.
Among the top priorities for high-energy astronomy in the coming decade are sensitive surveys in the hard X-ray/soft γ-ray (10-600 keV) and medium-energy γ-ray (0.2-80 MeV) bands. Historically, observations in the soft and medium energy γ-ray bands have been conducted using detectors based on inorganic scintillators read out by photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs). These observations were limited by the modest energy and time resolution of traditional scintillator materials (e.g. NaI and CsI), and by the demands on mission resources imposed by the bulky, fragile, high-voltage PMTs. Recent technologic…
This article describes simulations of scattering of annihilation gamma quanta in a strip of plastic scintillator. Such strips constitute basic detection modules in a newly proposed Positron Emission Tomography which utilizes plastic scintillators instead of inorganic crystals. An algorithm simulating chain of Compton scatterings was elaborated and series of simulations have been conducted for the scintillator strip with the cross section of 5 mm x 19 mm. Obtained results indicate that secondary interactions occur only in the case of about 8% of events and out of them only 25$\%$ take place in …
Currently inorganic scintillator detectors are used in all commercial Time of Flight Positron Emission Tomograph (TOF-PET) devices. The J-PET collaboration investigates a possibility of construction of a PET scanner from plastic scintillators which would allow for single bed imaging of the whole human body. This paper describes a novel method of hit-position reconstruction based on sampled signals and an example of an application of the method for a single module with a 30 cm long plastic strip, read out on both ends by Hamamatsu R4998 photomultipliers. The sampling scheme to generate a vector…
The NeuLAND (New Large-Area Neutron Detector) plastic-scintillator-based time-of-flight detector for 0.1-1.6 GeV neutrons is currently under construction at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), Darmstadt, Germany. In its final configuration, NeuLAND will consist of 3000 2.7 m $\times$ 5 cm $\times$ 5 cm big plastic scintillator bars that are read out on each end by fast timing photomultipliers. Here, data from a comprehensive study of an alternative light readout scheme using silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) are reported. For this purpose, a NeuLAND bar was instrumented on each …
Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are semiconductor-based light-sensors offering a high gain, a mechanically and optically robust design and high photon detection efficiency. Due to these characteristics, they started to replace conventional photomultiplier tubes in many applications in recent years. This paper presents an optical module based on SiPMs designed for the application in scintillators as well as lab measurements. The module hosts the SiPM bias voltage supply and three pre-amplifiers with different gain levels to exploit the full dynamic range of the SiPMs. Two SiPMs, read-out in pa…
A calorimetric polarimeter based on inorganic LYSO scintillators is described. It has been designed for use in a storage ring to search for electric dipole moments (EDM) of charged particles such as the proton and deuteron. Its development and first use was on the Cooler Synchrotron (COSY) at the Forschungszentrum Jülich with 0.97 GeV/c polarized deuterons, a particle and energy suitable for an EDM search. The search requires a polarimeter with high efficiency, large analyzing power, and stable operating characteristics. With typical beam momenta of about 1 GeV/c, the scattering of protons or …
The inorganic CsI(Tl) crystal scintillator is a candidate served as an anti-compton detector for China Dark matter EXperiment (CDEX). Studying the intrinsic radiopurity of CsI(Tl) crystal is an issue of major importance. The timing, energy and spatial correlations, as well as the capability of pulse shape discrimination provide powerful methods for the measurement of intrinsic radiopurities. The experimental design, detector performance and event-selection algorithms are described. A total of 359*3 kg-days data from three prototypes of CsI(Tl) crystals were taken at China Jinping underground l…
