Highly lead-loaded red plastic scintillators as an X-ray imaging system for the Laser Mega Joule

Conference · Fri Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/ANIMMA.2011.6172844· OSTI ID:22039832

Hamel, M; Normand, S ^[1]; Turk, G; Darbon, S ^[2]

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1. CEA, LIST, Laboratoire Capteurs et Architectures Electroniques, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
2. CEA, DAM, DIF, F-91297 Arpajon (France)

The scope of this project intends to record spatially resolved images of core shape and size of a DT micro-balloon during Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) experiments at Laser Mega Joule facility (LMJ). We need to develop an X-ray imaging system which can operate in the radiative background generated by an ignition shot of ICF. The scintillator is a part of the imaging system and has to gather a compromise of scintillating properties (scintillating efficiency, decay time, emission wavelength) so as to both operate in the hard radiative environment and to allow the acquisition of spatially resolved images. Inorganic scintillators cannot be used because no compromise can be found regarding the expected scintillating properties, most of them are not fast enough and emit blue light. Organic scintillators are generally fast, but present low X-ray absorption in the 10 to 40 keV range, that does not permit the acquisition of spatially resolved images. To this aim, we have developed highly lead-loaded and red-fluorescent fast plastic scintillators. Such a combination is not currently available via scintillator suppliers, since they propose only blue-fluorescent plastic scintillators doped with up to 12%w Pb. Thus, incorporation ratio up to 27%w Pb has been reached in our laboratory, which can afford a plastic scintillator with an outstanding Z{sub eff} close to 50. X-rays in the 10 to 40 keV range can thus be detected with a higher probability of photoelectric effect than for classic organic scintillators, such as NE102. The strong orange-red fluorescence can be filtered, so that we can eliminate residual Cerenkov light, generated by {gamma}-ray absorption in glass parts of the imaging system. Decay times of our scintillators evaluated under UV excitation were estimated to be in the range 10 to 13 ns. (authors)

• OSTI ID: 22039832
• Resource Relation: Conference: ANIMMA 2011: 2. International Conference on Advancements in Nuclear Instrumentation, Measurement Methods and their Applications, Ghent (Belgium), 6-9 Jun 2011; Other Information: Country of input: France; 19 refs.; IEEE Catalog Number: CFP1124I-CDR
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
BALLOONS
DECAY
DOPED MATERIALS
EFFICIENCY
EXCITATION
FLUORESCENCE
GAMMA RADIATION
GLASS
ICF DEVICES
INERTIAL CONFINEMENT
KEV RANGE
LEAD
PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT
PLASTIC SCINTILLATORS
VISIBLE RADIATION
WAVELENGTHS
X RADIATION