SPORT: A new sub-nanosecond time-resolved instrument to study swift heavy ion-beam induced luminescence – Application to luminescence degradation of a fast plastic scintillator

Abstract

We developed a new sub-nanosecond time-resolved instrument to study the dynamics of UVvisible luminescence under high stopping power heavy ion irradiation. We applied our instrument, called SPORT, on a fast plastic scintillator (BC-400) irradiated with 27-MeV Ar ions having high mean electronic stopping power of 2.6 MeV/µm. As a consequence of increasing permanent radiation damages with increasing ion fluence, our investigations reveal a degradation of scintillation intensity together with, thanks to the time-resolved measurement, a decrease in the decay constant of the scintillator. This combination indicates that luminescence degradation processes by both dynamic and static quenching, the latter mechanism being predominant. Under such high density excitation, the scintillation deterioration of BC-400 is significantly enhanced compared to that observed in previous investigations, mainly performed using light ions. The observed non-linear behaviour implies that the dose at which luminescence starts deteriorating is not independent on particles' stopping power, thus illustrating that the radiation hardness of plastic scintillators can be strongly weakened under high excitation density in heavy ion environments.

Monitoring Ion Track Formation Using In Situ RBS/c, ToF-ERDA, and HR-PIXE

“…HR-PIXE offers direct insight into the earliest processes occurring during the ion track formation [ 58 , 59 ]. Ionoluminescence can also provide similar information, but the timescale of the observed processes is on a much slower sub-nanosecond scale [ 32 , 33 ]. Results presented here demonstrate that the experimental capabilities of our HR-PIXE set-up are sufficient for investigating the early stages of ion track formation.…”

“…However, such detailed studies require irradiation and RBS/c measurements on a large number of samples demanding a large amount of beamtime. Recently, a solution to this problem was implemented in the establishment of experimental set-ups for in situ measurements using different analytical techniques like IL [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ], X-ray diffraction [ 36 ], AFM [ 37 ], and Raman Spectroscopy [ 38 , 39 ].…”