Additive manufacturing of fine-granularity optically-isolated plastic scintillator elements

Abstract

Plastic scintillator detectors are used in high energy physics as well as for diagnostic imaging in medicine, beam monitoring on hadron therapy, muon tomography, dosimetry and many security applications. To combine particle tracking and calorimetry it is necessary to build detectors with three-dimensional granularity, i.e. small voxels of scintillator optically isolated from each other. Recently, the 3DET collaboration demonstrated the possibility to 3D print polystyrene-based scintillators with a light output performance close to that obtained with standard production methods. In this article, after providing a further characterization of the developed scintillators, we show the first matrix of plastic scintillator cubes optically separated by a white reflector material entirely 3D printed with fused deposition modeling. This is a major milestone towards the 3D printing of the first real particle detector. A discussion of the results as well as the next steps in the R&D is also provided.

Studies of time resolution, light yield, and crosstalk using SiPM-on-tile calorimetry for the future Electron-Ion Collider

“…Additionally, cells made with the injection molding technique [45] could help improve cell uniformity and simplify the assembly process even further. Alternatively, the scintillating cells along with the opaque frame and reflective material could be produced as a single piece with a 3D-printing technique [46,47] that could facilitate the production of the irregular cells on the edge of the detector. Future reconstruction studies involving multiple showers will be necessary to quantify the physics impact of the cross-talk reduction that we report in this paper.…”

Camera‐based radiotherapy dosimetry using dual‐material 3D printed scintillator arrays

“…Material cross‐contamination is of primary concern during scintillator array fabrication as it can result in occluded scintillators with poor light output and occurs as the unused nozzle oozes onto the printing array 11 . This can be mitigated at the expense of print time by using a combination of aggressive filament retractions and printing either a prime tower or adding a waiting period between material changes at a location far away from the print.…”

“…By doping polystyrene with 2% by weight of p‐terphenyl, 0.05% by weight of POPOP and 5% by weight of the plasticizer biphenyl they produced a flexible plastic scintillating filament for use in FDM 3D printing. While not yet published at the time of writing, in March of 2022 the CERN EP‐Neutrino group posted a preprint on arXiv demonstrating a 3 × 3 matrix of plastic scintillator cubes (1 cm 3 ) optically separated by a white reflector material that had been entirely FDM 3D printed 11 …”

3D printing of inorganic scintillator-based particle detectors

“…Although the results obtained in [3] are very promising, work is in progress in order to improve the 3D printed scintillator performance, the geometrical tolerance and the uniformity in the reproducibility of multiple samples, towards the first real particle detector ever 3D printed. The main goal will be the fast and cost-effective production of massive fine-granularity polystyrene-based plastic-scintillator detectors with applications in high-energy physics (HEP), such as neutrino active -1 -…”

“…As we have shown recently, plastic scintillators based on polystyrene were manufactured using fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing technology with characteristics comparable with the standard production techniques such as cast polymerization, extrusion, and injection molding [2]. Moreover, FDM technology allows printing of both scintillator and reflector at once by using two extruders [3]. Hence, it allows to create multi-element scintillation detectors, such as an array of scintillation cubes or tiles separated by a reflector, as well as the production of combined scintillation detectors from several scintillation materials.…”