Scintillation properties of N2 and CF4 and performances of a scintillating ionization chamber

G. Lehaut (1) , S. Samuel Salvador (1) , J.M. Fontbonne (1) , F.R. Lecolley (1) , J. Perronnel (1) , Ch. Vandamme (1)

1 LPCC - Laboratoire de physique corpusculaire de Caen

In this work, we studied the emission yields, decay times and coincidence resolving times (CRT) of two gases, nitrogen (N2) and tetrafluoromethane (CF4), used for particle detection in the context of fission products measurement. The setup was made of an ionization chamber and two photomul-tiplier tubes (PMTs) placed front-to-front on each side of the active zone of the chamber. Using the photomultiplier tubes, the number of photoelectrons (phe) converted at the photocathodes from the scintillation processes in each gas were quantified and the scintillation time spectra were recorded. An scintillation emission yield of 24 phe MeV −1 with a decay time of τ d = 2.5 ns in N2, and 225 phe MeV −1 with τ d = 6.2 ns for CF4, have been measured. With our setup , the coincidence resolving time (σ values) between the two PMTs have been measured at 1.4 ns and 0.34 ns for N2 and CF4 respectively, using alpha particles.

Keywords: Ionisation Chamber; Scintillation properties; Time Resolution

Domains: Nuclear Experiment [nucl-ex]

G. Lehaut, S. Samuel Salvador, J.M. Fontbonne, F.R. Lecolley, J. Perronnel, et al.. Scintillation properties of N2 and CF4 and performances of a scintillating ionization chamber. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 2015, 797, pp.57-63. ⟨10.1016/j.nima.2015.05.050⟩. ⟨in2p3-01170130⟩