10

I am working on a project to create and launch a weather balloon with a particle detector system attached to it to measure muon flux at different altitudes. The previous project lead decided to drill holes in all of our plastic scintillators so we could bolt them to SiPMs. This is obviously going to impact the quality of our data, but I am not sure if they are still usable or what effect this would specifically have, does anyone know what this would do to the measurement capabilities of a scintillator? I have attached pictures of one of them, we have four in a very similar condition.

Also, any other tips on putting together a muon detector would be greatly appreciated.

enter image description here

Qmechanic
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a.frieb
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2 Answers2

9

Should be fine as long as they still scintillate. Take one out in the sunshine; you can usually see the purple tinge.

A bigger concern to me would be the crazing on the surface. If your optical fixative to the photodetector has a good match to the scintillator's index of refraction, you might get a good optical coupling without having to polish the surface.

rob
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5

You have a have plenty of cosmic rays between sea level and Cusco, so, instead of asking us to tell you the answer, you can measure their efficiency.

Stack all 4 together and do pair-wise coincident detection, recording all 4 outputs. From the number of 4, 3, and 2 logical-true detections, along with your edge effects model, and clever stacking configurations, you can measure how effective they are.

JEB
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