Search results for "scintillator"
showing 10 items of 172 documents
Study of scintillation light collection, production and propagation in a 4 tonne dual-phase LArTPC
2020
The $3 \times 1 \times 1$ m$^3$ demonstrator is a dual phase liquid argon time projection chamber that has recorded cosmic rays events in 2017 at CERN. The light signal in these detectors is crucial to provide precise timing capabilities. The performances of the photon detection system, composed of five PMTs, are discussed. The collected scintillation and electroluminescence light created by passing particles has been studied in various detector conditions. In particular, the scintillation light production and propagation processes have been analyzed and compared to simulations, improving the understanding of some liquid argon properties.
A novel experimental system for the KDK measurement of the 40K decay scheme relevant for rare event searches
2020
Potassium-40 ($^{40}$K) is a long-lived, naturally occurring radioactive isotope. The decay products are prominent backgrounds for many rare event searches, including those involving NaI-based scintillators. $^{40}$K also plays a role in geochronological dating techniques. The branching ratio of the electron capture directly to the ground state of argon-40 has never been measured, which can cause difficulty in interpreting certain results or can lead to lack of precision depending on the field and analysis technique. The KDK (Potassium (K) Decay (DK)) collaboration is measuring this decay. A composite method has a silicon drift detector with an enriched, thermally deposited $^{40}$K source …
Influence of boron on the essential properties for new generation scintillators
2021
Abstract Cerium doped yttrium aluminum (YAG:Ce) and lutetium aluminum garnets (LuAG:Ce) are some of the most popular materials used as scintillators. While the scintillators themselves are materials that absorb and convert high-energy radiation into light. The decay time in YAG:Ce and LuAG:Ce is about 60 ns, therefore the essential task for their improvement would be to shorten it as much as possible. For this reason, in this work, the aforementioned garnets were doped with different amounts of boron. B3+ ion has a suitable neutron capture cross section and can therefore absorb gamma radiation. Because of the extremely strong absorption of thermal neutrons and the weak interaction with MeV …
Detecting the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background in the future Water-based Liquid Scintillator Detector Theia
2021
A large-scale neutrino observatory based on water-based liquid scintillator (WbLS) will be excellently suited for a measurement of the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). The WbLS technique offers high signal efficiency and effective suppression of the otherwise overwhelming background from neutral-current interactions of atmospheric neutrinos. To illustrate this, we investigate the DSNB sensitivity for two configurations of the future Theia detector by developing the expected signal and background rejection efficiencies along a full analysis chain. Based on a statistical analysis of the remaining signal and background rates, we find that a rather moderate exposure of $190\text{ }…
Calibration of a neutron time-of-flight multidetector system for an intensity interferometry experiment
2004
We present the details of an experiment on light particle interferometry. In particular, we focus on a time-of-flight technique which uses a cyclotron RF signal as a start and a liquid scintillator time signal as a stop, to measure neutron energy in the range of En approximate to 1.8-150 MeV. This dynamic range (up to 300 ns) is much larger than the beam bunch separation (54 ns) of the AGOR cyclotron (KVI). However, the problem of a short burst period is overcome by using the time information obtained from a fast projectile fragment phoswich detector. The complete analysis procedure to extract the final neutron kinetic energy spectra, is discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The NUMEN project @ LNS: Status and perspectives
2017
The NUMEN project aims at accessing experimentally driven information on Nuclear Matrix Elements (NME) involved in the half-life of the neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ), by high-accuracy measurements of Heavy Ion (HI) induced Double Charge Exchange (DCE) reaction cross sections. In particular, the (18O,18Ne) and (20Ne,20O) reactions are used as tools for β+β+ and β−β− decays, respectively. In the experiments, performed at INFN - Laboratory Nazionali del Sud (LNS) in Catania, the beams are accelerated by the Superconducting Cyclotron (CS) and the reaction ejectiles are detected the MAGNEX magnetic spectrometer. The measured cross sections are challengingly low (a few nb), being the tota…
Electron Spin Resonance study of charge trapping in α-ZnMoO4 single crystal scintillator
2015
The origin and properties of electron and hole traps simultaneously appearing in a-ZnMoO4 scintillator after X-ray irradiation at low temperatures (T < 35 K) were studied by Electron Spin Resonance (ESR). ESR spectrum of the electron type trap shows pronounced superhyperfine structure due to the interaction of electron spin with nuclear magnetic moments of 95,97Mo and 67Zn lattice nuclei. Considering the nearly tetragonal symmetry of the center this allows us to identify the electron trap as an electron self-trapped at the (Mo(1)O4) 2 complex. Nearly 60% reduction of the spin–orbit coupling at the Mo(1) ion is caused by the overlap of the Mo and ligand oxygen orbitals indicating an essentia…
Construction, Commissioning and First Results of a Highly Granular Hadron Calorimeter with SiPM-on-Tile Read-out
2018
The CALICE collaboration is developing a highly granular Analogue Hadron sampling CALorimeter (AHCAL) for a future electron-positron collider. Very small detection units are required for the AHCAL due to an optimized design for the Particle Flow Algorithm. This is realized with scintillator tiles each wrapped in reflector foil and individually read out by a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM). These scintillator tiles and SiPMs are assembled on readout boards (HCAL Base Unit, HBU) which are integrated later on in the AHCAL detector stack. With this design a higher energy resolution is achievable, but also a large quantity of components (around 8,000,000 scintillator tiles and SiPMs) are needed t…
The next-generation liquid-scintillator neutrino observatory LENA
2012
We propose the liquid-scintillator detector LENA (Low Energy Neutrino Astronomy) as a next-generation neutrino observatory on the scale of 50 kt. The outstanding successes of the Borexino and KamLAND experiments demonstrate the large potential of liquid-scintillator detectors in low-energy neutrino physics. LENA's physics objectives comprise the observation of astrophysical and terrestrial neutrino sources as well as the investigation of neutrino oscillations. In the GeV energy range, the search for proton decay and long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments complement the low-energy program. Based on the considerable expertise present in European and international research groups, the …
Topological track reconstruction in unsegmented, large-volume liquid scintillator detectors
2018
Unsegmented, large-volume liquid scintillator (LS) neutrino detectors have proven to be a key technology for low-energy neutrino physics. The efficient rejection of radionuclide background induced by cosmic muon interactions is of paramount importance for their success in high-precision MeV neutrino measurements. We present a novel technique to reconstruct GeV particle tracks in LS, whose main property, the resolution of topological features and changes in the differential energy loss $\mathrm{d}E/\mathrm{d}x$, allows for improved rejection strategies. Different to common track reconstruction approaches, our method does not rely on concrete track / topology hypotheses. Instead, based on a r…