Speaker
Description
LiquidO is an innovative scintillator-based radiation detector concept whose core principle is the self-segmentation of the detector volume via stochastic light confinement in an opaque medium. Light produced in the scintillator is confined near its creation point thanks to the short scattering length of the material, and efficiently collected by a lattice of wavelength-shifting optical fibres routed to silicon photomultipliers.
This poster explores two recent prototypes implementing the LiquidO technology: a 64-fibre cube and a 256-fibre planar detector. Both detectors are filled with a wax-based opaque scintillator, characterised by a sub-millimetre scattering length. When traversed by cosmic-ray muons, the stochastic confinement of scintillation light produces the characteristic LiquidO "light cylinder", enabling clear event identification and reconstruction of the muon track position and direction.
A key feature of LiquidO is the preservation of event topology. By confining scintillation light close to its emission point, the characteristic energy deposition patterns of different particles are retained, enabling powerful particle identification capabilities. This is demonstrated with the 256-fibre planar detector, in which through-going and stopping muons produce clearly distinguishable event topologies.
The results obtained with the prototypes presented here represent an important step toward applying LiquidO in a range of contexts, including nuclear reactor monitoring, cosmic-ray imaging, non-proliferation imaging, and astrophysical explorations, and contribute to the wider development efforts of the LiquidO consortium.