Development and Studies of Novel Microfabricated Radiation Hard Scintillation Detectors With High Spatial Resolution

A new type of scintillation detector is being developed with standard microfabrication techniques. It consists of a dense array of scintillating waveguides obtained by coupling microfluidic channels filled with a liquid scintillator to photodetectors. Easy manipulation of liquid scintillators inside microfluidic devices allow their flushing, renewal, and exchange making the active medium intrinsically radiation hard. Prototype detectors have been fabricated by photostructuration of a radiation hard epoxy resin (SU-8) deposited on silicon wafers and coupled to a multi-anode photomultiplier tube (MAPMT) to read-out the scintillation light. They have been characterized by exciting the liquid scintillator in the 200 micrometers thick microchannels with electrons from a Sr-90 yielding approximately 1 photoelectron per impinging Minimum Ionizing Particle (MIP). These promising results demonstrate the concept of microfluidic scintillating detection and are very encouraging for future developments.