Quenching measurements and modeling of a boron-loaded organic liquid scintillator

Westerdale, S.; Xu, J.; Shields, E.; Froborg, F.; Calaprice, F.; Alexander, T.; Aprahamian, A.; Back, H. O.; Casarella, C.; Fang, X.; Gupta, Y. K.; Lamere, E.; Liu, Q.; Lyons, S.; Smith, M.; Tan, W.

doi:10.1088/1748-0221/12/08/P08002

Quenching measurements and modeling of a boron-loaded organic liquid scintillator

Journal Article · Tue Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · Journal of Instrumentation

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/12/08/P08002· OSTI ID:1355923

Westerdale, S.; Xu, J.; Shields, E.; Froborg, F.; Calaprice, F.; Alexander, T.; Aprahamian, A.; Back, H. O.; Casarella, C.; Fang, X.; Gupta, Y. K.; Lamere, E.; Liu, Q.; Lyons, S.; Smith, M.; Tan, W.

Organic liquid scintillators are used in a wide variety of applications in experimental nuclear and particle physics. Boron-loaded scintillators are particularly useful for detecting neutron captures, due to the high thermal neutron capture cross section of $$^{10}$$B. These scintillators are commonly used in neutron detectors, including the DarkSide-50 neutron veto, where the neutron may produce a signal when it scatters off protons in the scintillator or when it captures on $$^{10}$$B. Reconstructing the energy of these recoils is complicated by scintillation quenching. Understanding how nuclear recoils are quenched in these scintillators is an important and difficult problem. In this article, we present a set of measurements of neutron-induced proton recoils in a boron-loaded organic liquid scintillator at recoil energies ranging from 57--467 keV, and we compare these measurements to predictions from different quenching models. We find that a modified Birks' model whose denominator is quadratic in $dE/dx$ best describes the measurements, with $$\chi^2$$/NDF$=1.6$. This result will help model nuclear recoil scintillation in similar detectors and can be used to improve their neutron tagging efficiency.

View Accepted Manuscript (DOE)

Research Organization:: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States); Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE; USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP) (SC-25)

Grant/Contract Number:: AC02-07CH11359; AC52-07NA27344

OSTI ID:: 1355923

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 1426120
OSTI ID: 22656216
OSTI ID: 1375375

Report Number(s):: FERMILAB-PUB--17-126-AE; LLNL-JRNL--738009; arXiv:1703.07214; 1518617

Journal Information:: Journal of Instrumentation, Journal Name: Journal of Instrumentation Journal Issue: 08 Vol. 12; ISSN 1748-0221

Publisher:: Institute of Physics (IOP)Copyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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