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.
In this work, the focus is on evaluating the performance of a 256-fibres planar LiquidO detector. The prototype consists of eight layers of fibres arranged in two perpendicular directions with a 5-millimetre pitch, each fibre read out at both ends. The active volume contains 1.5 litres of 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 previous 3-cm cube LiquidO prototype demonstrated sub-millimetre position resolution in one dimension, achieved with fibres instrumented along a single direction. The detector presented here extends these studies to three dimensions, enabling an investigation of the imaging capabilities of the LiquidO technology at larger detection volumes.
The results obtained with this larger prototype 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.
