Study of scintillation in natural and synthetic quartz and methacrylate

Abstract

Samples from different materials typically used as optical windows or light guides in scintillation detectors were studied in a very low background environment, at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, searching for scintillation. A positive result can be confirmed for natural quartz: two distinct scintillation components have been identified, not being excited by an external gamma source. Although similar effect has not been observed neither for synthetic quartz nor for methacrylate, a fast light emission excited by intense gamma flux is evidenced for all the samples in our measurements. These results could affect the use of these materials in low energy applications of scintillation detectors requiring low radioactive background conditions, as they entail a source of background.

Accepted for publication in Optical Materials

References in corpus (3)

• Direct dark matter detection: the next decade
• Recent Progress in Double Beta Decay
• Performance of the Hamamatsu R11410 Photomultiplier Tube in cryogenic Xenon Environments

Cited by in corpus (10)

• First search for a dark matter annual modulation signal with NaI(Tl) in the Southern Hemisphere by DM-Ice17
• First data from DM-Ice17
• Performance of ANAIS-112 experiment after the first year of data taking
• Assessment of backgrounds of the ANAIS experiment for dark matter direct detection
• Light yield determination in large sodium iodide detectors applied in the search for dark matter
• Bulk NaI(Tl) scintillation low energy events selection with the ANAIS-0 module
• Status of the ANAIS Dark Matter Project at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory
• Design, scale-up and characterization of the data acquisition system for the ANAIS dark matter experiment
• The ANAIS Dark Matter Project: Status and Prospects
• From ANAIS-25 towards ANAIS-250