Scintillator

Summary

A scintillator ('sɪntɪleɪtər ) is a material that exhibits scintillation, the property of luminescence, when excited by ionizing radiation. Luminescent materials, when struck by an incoming particle, absorb its energy and scintillate (i.e. re-emit the absorbed energy in the form of light). Sometimes, the excited state is metastable, so the relaxation back down from the excited state to lower states is delayed (necessitating anywhere from a few nanoseconds to hours depending on the material). The process then corresponds to one of two phenomena: delayed fluorescence or phosphorescence. The correspondence depends on the type of transition and hence the wavelength of the emitted optical photon. Principle of operation A scintillation detector or scintillation counter is obtained when a scintillator is coupled to an electronic light sensor such as a photomultiplier tube (PMT), photodiode, or silicon photomultiplier. PMTs absorb the light emitted by the scintillator and re-emit

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This paper describes the development of a novel medical x-ray imaging system adapted to the needs and constraints of low- and middle-income countries. The developed system is based on an indirect conversion chain: a scintillator plate produces visible light when excited by the x rays, and then, a calibrated multi-camera architecture converts the visible light from the scintillator into a set of digital images. The partial images are then unwarped, enhanced, and stitched through parallel field programmable gate array processing units and specialized software. All the detector components were carefully selected focusing on optimizing the system’s image quality, robustness, cost-effectiveness, and capability to work in harsh tropical environments. With this aim, different customized and commercial components were characterized. The resulting detector can generate high quality medical diagnostic images with detective quantum efficiency levels up to 60% (@2.34 μGy), even under harsh environments, i.e., 60 °C and 98% humidity.

2022

This thesis deals with the development and study of microfluidic scintillation detectors, a technology of recent introduction for the detection of high energy particles. Most of the interest for such devices comes from the use of a liquid scintillator, which entails the possibility of changing the active material in the detector, leading to increased radiation resistance. A first part of the thesis focuses on the work performed in terms of design and modelling studies of novel prototype devices, hinting to new possibilities and applications. In this framework, the simulations performed to validate selected designs and the main technological choices made in view of their fabrication are addressed. The second part of this thesis deals with the microfabrication of several prototype devices. Two different materials were studied for the manufacturing of microfluidic scintillation detectors, namely the SU-8 photosensitive epoxy and monocrystalline silicon. For what concerns the former, an original fabrication approach based on successive bonding and selective release steps of resin layers patterned over sacrificial metal films is detailed. This approach was used to fabricate monolithic, free-standing devices embedding one or two layers of microfluidic channels, with a material budget corresponding to only 0.03% and 0.06% of the radiation length of SU-8. A first experimental validation of these devices is presented as well. Concerning silicon devices, studies on the fabrication of microchannel arrays by both dry and wet etching are reported. Adaptations of these standard techniques to the specific needs of microfluidic scintillation detectors are addressed, specifically the smoothing of scalloped sidewalls resulting from deep reactive ion etching as well as the mask design methodology applied to KOH etching in order to yield microchannels with smooth vertical sidewalls on wafers with the standard crystalline orientation. The anisotropic characteristics of wet etching were also exploited to demonstrate the fabrication of arrays of microfluidic channels having slanted reflective facets at their extremities, which can act as micromirrors that deviate the scintillation light in the out of plane direction, thus introducing new possibilities for the planar integration of the devices. Experimental results on the characterization of the light yield and attenuation length of silicon prototype devices performed using electrons from a radioactive source are presented. A brief study on the accelerated ageing of the detector in which the liquid scintillator was damaged by intense UV irradiation is reported. Such study provides encouraging results on how the capability of recirculating the active material in microfluidic scintillation detectors can be used to extend their lifetime or increase the stability of their performance in time.

EPFL2015

A Fast Ion Loss Detector for the TCV Tokamak

Lorenzo Stipani

A Fast Ion Loss Detector (FILD) was designed, assembled, installed and commissioned for TCV. This is a radially positionable, scintillator based detector that provides information on the 2D fast-ion velocity space lost at the probe's location. The collected particles are collimated inside the probe head and impinge upon a plate coated with a scintillator material that emits light. The photon flux is relayed to two acquisition systems: a sCMOS camera for high spatial resolution measurements of the emission locations in the scintillator, and fast photo-multipliers that allow time-correlation studies of fast-ion losses with high-frequency electromagnetic fluctuations. From its position with respect to the confined plasma and the fast-ion sources on TCV, FILD probes a small portion of the lost fast-ion phase space with high velocity-space and temporal resolution. Therefore, it naturally complements other available diagnostics such as neutral particle analysers, spectroscopy techniques for light emission from energetic particles following CX reactions, or neutron counters, which feature a broader, but less resolved, spatial coverage of fast-ion dynamics.The TCV-FILD design introduces some novelties for exploring new ranges of operation that may be adopted in similar systems for other Tokamaks, such as ITER. Two entrance slits can collect particles that circulate in co- and cntr-plasma current directions. This will be particularly useful when the second NBH system, injecting in the opposite toroidal direction, with particle energies that can excite strong Alfvénic modes, will be operated on TCV. A controlled pneumatic linear actuator radially positions the detector to expose the slits to the particle flux up to 9mm inward of the vessel wall. A plug-in design was conceived to facilitate diagnostic installation. The diagnostic was installed and commissioned during TCV experiments in 2020. The sensitivity of the detector to the local magnetic field line direction was investigated. The direction of the plasma current was found to select which of the two slits may be traversed by lost particles. The operational limits in discharges with NBH with total delivered energies up to 1MJ were assessed with the help of sensors monitoring the temperature of the probe head and cameras detecting visible light emissions resulting from the graphite shield heating by particle fluxes. Using FILD, fast-ion losses were detected for the first time on TCV in plasma discharges exhibiting strong MHD modes. Ejections of energetic ions were found correlated in time with Sawtooth crashes, as a sequence of individual events, and in strong phase coherence, as a continuous loss in time, with magnetic perturbations of a saturated and toroidally rotating magnetic island of a NTM. These observations, in addition to providing initial results on the relevant physics phenomena, stimulating further experiments and comparisons with theory, demonstrate the ability of TCV-FILD to provide valuable information in plasma discharges of interest for fast-ion studies. These measurements and additional information from other TCV diagnostics may now be combined to reconstruct, with tomographic inversion techniques, more of the fast-ion phase space. This will be used to identify the conditions for the excitation/suppression of magnetic instabilities, develop methods for their real-time control with heating and/or shaping actuators and investigate their dependencies on plasma parameters.

EPFL2021