Speaker
Description
Plastic scintillators offer significant advantages for particle detection, including high density, exceptional light yield, excellent energy resolution for precise energy measurements, fast signal response, capability for fine segmentation enabling high-precision tracking, and robustness for working with particle beams. Recently, cubic plastic scintillators have been successfully used in a 3D neutrino detector SuperFGD containing about 2 million components [1, 2]. This detector serves as a near neutrino detector in the long baseline experiment T2K [3].
The development of such segmented neutrino detectors with several times more components imposes strict requirements on key parameters such as light yield, optical crosstalk, and geometric precision. In this study, a 5 x 5 x 5 array of 1 cm^3 cubic plastic scintillators was tested using a 730 MeV/c pion beam. Three wavelength-shifted (WLS) orthogonal fibers pass through each cube and connect to micropixel photosensors MPPCs for signal readout [4]. High-resolution tracking system with a spatial resolution of 0.5 mm enabled to reconstruct the particle interaction point.
The dependence of the light yield and optical crosstalk on the particle interaction position in the scintillator cube will be presented in the talk. The results demonstrate high performance and reliability of the cubic scintillator design. These measurements enable improved the simulation accuracy of highly segmented plastic scintillator detectors.
[1] S. Fedotov et al., Scintillator cubes for 3D neutrino detector SuperFGD, J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 2374 (2022) 012106.
[2] Yu. Kudenko, 3D segmented neutrino detector SuperFGD, Nat. Sci. Rev. 2 (2025) 100304.
[3] K. Abe et al. The T2K Experiment, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A659 (2011) 106–135.
[4] A. Blondel et al., A fully active fine-grained detector with three readout views, JINST 13 (2018) P02006.
