Measurement of ionization quenching in plastic scintillators

Abstract

Plastic scintillators are widely used in high-energy and medical physics, often for measuring the energy of ionizing radiation. Their main disadvantage is their non-linear response to highly ionizing radiation, called ionization quenching. This nonlinearity must be modeled and corrected for in applications where an accurate energy measurement is required. We present a new experimental technique to granularly measure the dependence of quenching on energy-deposition density. Based on this method, we determine the parameters for four commonly used quenching models for two commonly used plastic scintillators using protons with energies of 30 MeV to 100 MeV; and compare the models using a Bayesian approach. We also report the first model-independent measurement of the dependence of ionization quenching on energy-deposition density, providing a purely empirical view into quenching.

arXiv commentAccepted manuscript

References in corpus (1)

• BAT - The Bayesian Analysis Toolkit

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Dose rate effects in radiation-induced changes to phenyl-based polymeric scintillators
• BGO quenching effect on spectral measurements of cosmic-ray nuclei in DAMPE experiment
• Evaluation of the Response to Electrons and Pions in the Scintillating Fiber and Lead Calorimeter for the Future Electron-Ion Collider
• A Neural-Network Framework for Tracking and Identification of Cosmic-Ray Nuclei in the RadMap Telescope
• Fluorescence time profile measurement of LAB based liquid scintillator in response to medium relativistic ion particles