2011/06/29 by Hiroaki Nakamura, Yoshiyuki Shirakawa, Sentaro Takahashi +1 · 1 citation
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Detector #Materials science #Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications #Optics #Optoelectronics #Photon #Physics #Polyethylene #Radiation #Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies #Scintillation #Scintillation counter #Scintillator
paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/0295-5075/95/22001
openalex publication_date 2011/06/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Various scintillation devices are used in many countries and wide scientific fields. Key elements that determine the performance of a scintillation device are the number of photons emitted per incident radiation event and the emission of easy-to-measure blue photons. It isgenerally known that only materials with very complex compositions perform well as scintillators. However, we demonstrated that the scintillation performance of a newly developed plastic suchas 100 percent pure polyethylene naphthalate exceeds that of conventional organic scintillators. By measuring the light output spectra and emission spectra of several samples, we revealed that the plastic emits a high number of photons per incident radiation event (10500 photons/MeV), and, surprisingly, deep-blue photons (425nm). Even though the plastic has a simple composition,it could replace the expensive organic scintillators that have been used in many applications.