Ponente
Descripción
Noble liquid scintillators like argon (LAr) and xenon (LXe) are used as the main detection medium for many particle and rare-event search detectors in part due to their high scintillation yield, background rejection capabilities and scalability to large volumes. Many detectors combine measurements of the scintillation light from the noble liquids with a time projection chamber (TPC) which detects ionization electrons produced in the noble liquid from particle interactions. An electric field drifts these electrons towards a detection plane and the timing of the signal can provide position reconstruction information for these events. Clevios is an optically conductive organic polymer that can be coated onto a transparent scintillator containment vessel to act as the electrodes in a TPC. This configuration allows scintillation light to pass through the electrode coating to be detected by photodetectors on the other side of the vessel.
For Clevios and other materials between the scintillator and the photodetectors, it is important to understand if any emit undesirable fluorescent light that can contribute to the detector background signal. Fluorescence properties can often change with temperature, so it is also useful to study the material at the operating temperature of the detector.
The optical cryostat lab at Queen’s is well suited to study the photoluminescent properties of scintillators, substrates and coating at temperatures of 300 K to 4 K. We present the results of our studies into the fluorescence of Clevios including its change in detected light yield with temperature, spectral features and absorbance.
