An efficient method to measure the quenching effect of scintillators for particle-ion beams

For scintillator-based dose monitoring systems for particle-ion beams, measurements of the scintillators’ quenching effect at the Bragg peak area are important for predicting system performance, but such measurements are time consuming. To solve this problem, we propose and test an efficient method to measure the quenching effect of scintillators. In our method, we arranged small scintillator plates on the upper inside of a black box and irradiated uniform particle-ion beams to the scintillator plates from the upper side. The scintillation light image was reflected by a surface mirror set below the scintillators and detected by a cooled charge-coupled device (CCD) camera from the side. We measured the images by changing the thickness of acrylic plates, evaluated the intensity of each scintillator in the images and plotted it as a function of the thickness of the acrylic plates. With this method, we measured the depth profiles of eight different scintillators with a set of the measurements and efficiently evaluated the quenching effect of each scintillator. We conclude that our proposed method is promising to measure and evaluate the quenching effect of scintillators in a short time.