Red emitting silicones for particles detection: Coupling with APD

Up to date, neutron detection has been relying on sophisticated and voluminous systems, employing toxic and awkward liquid scintillators and fragile expensive PMT. In order to overcome these main drawbacks, red emitting polysiloxane based solid scintillators have been developed and optimized for coupling with high responsivity APD, having higher External Quantum Efficiency (EQE) in the red region of the visible spectrum. Optical properties of phenyl substituted polysiloxane based matrices, doped with different amounts of three organic dyes (PPO, Basf Lumogen Violet® and Basf Lumogen Red®) have been investigated in order to optimize light output for detection with APD. Scintillation performances of these red emitting scintillators have been measured with alpha particles and gamma rays and compared with the previously developed blue emitting polysiloxane based scintillators, showing an improved scintillation light yield with APD detectors. The performances of this polysiloxane based materials in fast neutron detection have also been verified using time of flight (TOF) discrimination technique with a 2.32 MeV neutron beam. Finally, the possibility to achieve pulse shape discrimination with this innovative materials has been also explored, achieving very interesting preliminary results that pave the way to the use of polysiloxane based scintillators in a field where liquid scintillators have been so far the only competitor. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.