Decay time and pulse shape discrimination of liquid scintillators based on novel solvents

Over the past few years the liquid scintillation technique employed for particle detection applications has undergone a significant technological breakthrough with the introduction of novel solvents tailored to address the concerns about toxicity, flammability and disposal problems associated with the scintillators of traditional formulation. The increasing popularity of the new solvents in the realization of experimental set-ups of various degrees of size and complexity implies the need of a thorough study and characterization of the features of the corresponding scintillation mixtures, with the aim to approach eventually a level of understanding similar to that, very accurate, achieved throughout many years of research for the scintillators realized with conventional solvents. In this general context, aim of this work is to illustrate the results of the fluorescence decay time and pulse shape discrimination measurements carried out on a set of scintillation mixtures realized using two of such novel solvents, i.e., linear alkylbenzene (LAB) and di-isopropylnaphthalene (DIN). The measurements have been performed either under particle or UV excitation of the scintillating solutions, which permitted to unravel the features both of the fast component and of the long tail forming the entire scintillation pulse. Moreover, the particle characterization via β or α excitation allows also predicting the α⧸β pulse shape discrimination capability of the mixtures, a property of paramount significance for applications focused on the increasingly important field of low background detectors.