Hadronic vs Electromagnetic Pulse Shape Discrimination in CsI(Tl) for High Energy Physics Experiments

Abstract

Pulse shape discrimination using CsI(Tl) scintillators to perform neutral hadron particle identification is explored with emphasis towards application at high energy electron-positron collider experiments. Through the analysis of the pulse shape differences between scintillation pulses from photon and hadronic energy deposits using neutron and proton data collected at TRIUMF, it is shown that the pulse shape variations observed for hadrons can be modelled using a third scintillation component for CsI(Tl), in addition to the standard fast and slow components. Techniques for computing the hadronic pulse amplitudes and shape variations are developed and it is shown that the intensity of the additional scintillation component can be computed from the ionization energy loss of the interacting particles. These pulse modelling and simulation methods are integrated with GEANT4 simulation libraries and the predicted pulse shape for CsI(Tl) crystals in a $5\times 5$ array of $5\times 5\times 30{\text{ cm}}^3$ crystals is studied for hadronic showers from 0.5 and 1 GeV/c $K_L^0$ and neutron particles. Using a crystal level and cluster level approach for photon vs hadron cluster separation we demonstrate proof-of-concept for neutral hadron detection using CsI(Tl) pulse shape discrimination in high energy electron-positron collider experiments.

This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication/published in Journal of Instrumentation. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/13/03/P03018

Cited by in corpus (3)

• CsI(Tl) Pulse Shape Discrimination with the Belle II Electromagnetic Calorimeter as a Novel Method to Improve Particle Identification at Electron-Positron Colliders
• Particle identification with the Belle II calorimeter using machine learning
• Energetic neutron identification with pulse shape discrimination in pure CsI crystals