LaBr3:Ce crystals are used for radiation imaging in medical physics, with PMT or SiPM readout. A R&D was pursued with 1/2 and 1" crystals to realize compact large area detectors (up to some cm$^2$ area) with SiPM array readout, aiming at high light yields, good energy resolution/linearity and fast time response for low-energy X-rays. The study was triggered by the FAMU experiment at RIKEN-RAL...
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be the next frontier project of nuclear physics in the United States. Excellent particle identification (PID) is one of the key requirements for the EIC central detector. A radially compact PID system using the Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC) principle is a very attractive solution to meet these requirements.
The R&D program...
The majority of future large-scale neutrino and dark matter experiments are based on liquid argon detectors. Since liquid argon is also a very effective scintillator, these experiments also have light detection systems. The fact that none of the existing photodetectors alone is sensitive to the liquid argon scintillation wavelength of 127 nm leads to the development of specialized light...
T2K is a long-baseline neutrino experiment that aims to investigate the CP violation in the neutrino sector. An upgrade of the ND280, which is one of the T2K near detectors, is in progress. The active target detector of the upgraded ND280 is a segmented highly granular plastic scintillation detector (SuperFGD) consisting of about two million cubes. About sixty thousand silicon...
The krypton electroluminescence yield was studied, at room temperature, as a function of electric field in the gas scintillation gap. A large area avalanche photodiode has been used to allow the simultaneous detection of the electroluminescence pulses as well as the direct interaction of x-rays, the latter being used as a reference for the calculation of the number of charge carriers produced...
Future HEP experiments at the energy and intensity frontiers require fast and ultrafast inorganic scintillators with excellent radiation hardness to face the challenges of unprecedented event rate and severe radiation environment. We report recent progress in fast and ultrafast inorganic scintillators for future HEP experiments. Examples are LYSO crystals and LuAG ceramics for an...
Japan’s KEK laboratory started developing silica aerogels as a Cherenkov radiator around 1980. The high-energy physics group at Chiba University began aerogel R&D ~15 years ago, collaborating with KEK. Improving aerogel transparency enables the design of state-of-the-art ring-imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detectors. This study was first motivated by the radiator R&D for the Belle II Aerogel RICH...
PEN and PET (polyethylene naphthalate and teraphthalate) are common plastics used for drink
bottles and plastic food containers. They are also good scintillators. Their ubiquity has made
them of interest for high energy physics applications, as generally plastic scintillators can be
very expensive. However, detailed studies on the performance of the scintillators has not yet been...
Excellent particle identification (PID) will be essential for the PANDA experiment at FAIR. The Barrel DIRC will separate kaons and pions with at least 3 s.d. for momenta up to 3.5 GeV/c and polar angles between 22 and 140 deg.
After successful validation of the final design in the CERN PS/T9 beam line, the tendering process for the two most time- and cost-intensive items, radiator bars and...
Optical scintillating fibers lose their transparencies when exposed to radiation. Nearly all studies of radiation damage to optical fibers so far only characterize this darkening with a single period of irradiation. Following the irradiation, fibers undergo room temperature annealing, and regain some of their transparencies. We tested the irradiation-recovery characteristics of scintillating...
Scintillating homogeneous detectors represent the state of the art in electromagnetic calorimetry. Moreover, the currently neglected crystalline nature of the most common inorganic scintillators can be exploited to achieve an outstanding performance boost in terms of compactness and energy resolution. In fact, it was recently demostrated by the AXIAL/ELIOT experiments that a strong reduction...
The radiation damage in optical materials, mostly manifest as the loss of optical transmission, recovers to some extent in the presence of natural light, and at a faster rate in the presence of stimulating light. On the other hand, the systematic study of the dynamics of the recovery as a function of the stimulating light parameters such as its wavelength, intensity and exposure duration and...
The scintillator can be seen as a wavelength shifter which converts the incident particle into a number of photons. The decay time of scintillators is measured by coupling the scintillation with the photosensitive device. Through the scintillation light waveform sampling and the decay time exponential fitting, we can obtain the decay time of the scintillation. Traditionally the photosensitive...
The two LHCb RICH detectors have provided excellent particle ID until the end of Run2 in 2018 operating at the luminosity of $\sim 4 \times 10^{32}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$. From the beginning of Run3 in 2022, the Level 0 hardware trigger of the experiment will be removed to allow data readout at the full LHC collision rate of 40 MHz and the luminosity will be increased to $\sim 2 \times 10^{33}$...
Aerogel RICH currently identifies charged particles in the Belle II spectrometer. Cherenkov photons, emitted in the aerogel radiator are detected by single-photon Hybrid Avalanche Photon sensors working in a 1.5 T magnetic field and occupying an area of 4.5 m$^2$. By 2030 the Belle II will reach its design goal of 50 ab$^{-1}$ and the HAPD performance will degrade. The upgrade of the...
