No Arabic abstract
Timing-pick up detectors with excellent timing resolutions are essential in many modern nuclear physics experiments. Aiming to develop a Time-Of-Flight system with precision down to about 10 ps, we have made a systematic study of the timing characteristic of TOF detectors, which consist of several combinations of plastic scintillators and photomultiplier tubes. With the conventional electronics, the best timing resolution of about 5.1 ps ({sigma}) has been achieved for detectors with an area size of 3x1 cm2. It is found that for data digitalization a combination of TAC and ADC can achieve a better time resolution than currently available TDC. Simultaneously measurements of both time and pulse height are very valuable for correction of time-walk effect.
Plastic scintillation detectors for Time-of-Flight (TOF) measurements are almost essential for event-by-event identification of relativistic rare isotopes. In this work, a pair of plastic scintillation detectors of 50 $times$ 50 $times$ 3$^{t}$ mm$^3$ and 80 $times$ 100 $times$ 3$^{t}$ mm$^3$ have been set up at the external target facility (ETF), Institute of Modern Physics. Their time, energy and position responses are measured with $^{18}$O primary beam at 400 MeV/nucleon. After the off-line walk-effect and position corrections, the time resolution of the two detectors are determined to be 27 ps ($sigma$) and 36 ps ($sigma$), respectively. Both detectors have nearly the same energy resolution of 3$%$ ($sigma$) and position resolution of 2 mm ($sigma$). The detectors have been used successfully in nuclear reaction cross section measurements, and will be be employed for upgrading RIBLL2 beam line at IMP as well as for the high energy branch at HIAF.
A new type of cold/ultracold neutron detector that can realize a spatial resolution of less than 100 nm was developed using nuclear emulsion. The detector consists of a fine-grained nuclear emulsion coating and a 50-nm thick $^{10}$B$_4$C layer for the neutron conversion. The detector was exposed to cold and ultracold neutrons (UCNs) at the J-PARC. Detection efficiencies were measured as (0.16$pm$0.02)% and (12$pm$2)% for cold and ultracold neutrons consistently with the $^{10}$B content in the converter. Positions of individual neutrons can be determined by observing secondary particle tracks recorded in the nuclear emulsion. The spatial resolution of incident neutrons were found to be in the range of 11-99 nm in the angle region of tan$thetaleq 1.9$, where $theta$ is the angle between a recorded track and the normal direction of the converter layer. The achieved spatial resolution corresponds to the improvement of one or two orders of magnitude compared with conventional techniques and it is comparable with the wavelength of UCNs.
A new type of neutron detector, named Stack Structure Solid organic Scintillator (S$^4$), consisting of multi-layer plastic scintillators with capability to suppress low-energy $gamma$ rays under high-counting rate has been constructed and tested. To achieve $it{n}$-$gamma$ discrimination, we exploit the difference in the ranges of the secondary charged particles produced by the interactions of neutrons and $gamma$ rays in the scintillator material. The thickness of a plastic scintillator layer was determined based on the results of Monte Carlo simulations using the Geant4 toolkit. With layer thicknesses of 5 mm, we have achieved a good separation between neutrons and $gamma$ rays at 5 MeV$_{rm ee}$ threshold setting. We have also determined the detection efficiencies using monoenergetic neutrons at two energies produced by the $it{d}$+$it{d}toit{n}$+$^{3}$He reaction. The results agree well with the Geant4 simulations implementing the Li$grave{rm e}$ge Intranuclear Cascade hadronic model (INCL++) and the high-precision model of low-energy neutron interactions (NeutronHP).
A new timing detector measuring ~50 MeV/c positrons is under development for the MEG II experiment, aiming at a time resolution $sigma_t sim 30~mathrm{ps}$. The resolution is expected to be achieved by measuring each positron time with multiple counters made of plastic scintillator readout by silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the time resolution for ~50 MeV/c positrons using prototype counters. Counters with dimensions of $90times 40times 5~mathrm{mm}^3$ readout by six SiPMs (three on each $40times 5~mathrm{mm}^2$ plane) were built with SiPMs from Hamamatsu Photonics and AdvanSiD and tested in a positron beam at the DA$Phi$NE Beam Test Facility. The time resolution was found to improve nearly as the square root of the number of counter hits. A time resolution $sigma_t=26.2pm1.3~mathrm{ps}$ was obtained with eight counters with Hamamatsu SiPMs. These results suggest that the design resolution is achievable in the MEG II experiment.
In this work we report on the Monte Carlo study performed to understand and reproduce experimental measurements of a new plastic b{eta}-detector with cylindrical geometry. Since energy deposition simulations differ from the experimental measurements for such a geometry, we show how the simulation of production and transport of optical photons does allow one to obtain the shapes of the experimental spectra. Moreover, taking into account the computational effort associated with this kind of simulation, we develop a method to convert the simulations of energy deposited into light collected, depending only on the interaction point in the detector. This method represents a useful solution when extensive simulations have to be done, as in the case of the calculation of the response function of the spectrometer in a total absorption {gamma}-ray spectroscopy analysis.