Optimizing the light output of a plastic scintillator and SiPM based detector through optical characterization and simulation: a case study for POLAR-2

作者：Nicolas De Angelis, F. Cadoux, Coralie Husi, Merlin Kole, S. Mianowski · 发表于：Journal of Instrumentation · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1088/1748-0221/20/02/p02010 · 被引用次数：3 · 研究领域：Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies、Radiation Therapy and Dosimetry、Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications

Abstract The combination of plastic scintillators with Silicon Photo-Multipliers (SiPMs) is widely used for detecting radiation in high-energy astrophysics, particle physics, neutrino physics, or medical physics. An example of application for this kind of detectors are Compton polarimeters such as POLAR-2 [1,2,3] or LEAP [4,5,6] for which a low-Z material is needed for the Compton effect to be dominant down to as low energy as possible. Such detectors aim to measure low energy Compton depositions in organic scintillators which produce small amounts of optical light because of the low energy deposited and the low scintillation efficiency, and for which optimizing the instrumental optical properties consequently imperative. The light collection efficiency of such a device was studied with a focus on the POLAR-2 Gamma-Ray Burst polarimeter. POLAR-2 consists of a segmented array of 6400 elongated plastic scintillators divided into 100 modules, all read out by SiPMs. The conversion of incoming γ -rays into readable signal goes through the production and collection of optical light, which has been optimized both through measurements and simulations. The optical elements of the POLAR-2 polarimeter prototype module were optically characterized and an optical simulation based on Geant4 was developed to fully model its optical performances. The results from simulations were used to optimize the design and finally to verify its performance. The study resulted in a detector capable of me...