A novel method for efficiently measuring the non-proportionality of scintillators between light output and alpha particle energies from 1.8 MeV to 5.2 MeV

Abstract

It is known that scintillators exhibit non-proportional behavior between light output and the energy of gamma photons or beta particles. However, the non-proportionality between light output in scintillators and the energy of alpha particles has not been extensively measured, likely due to the challenges associated with preparing alpha particles with varying energies. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to modulate the energy of alpha particles using an americium-241 (Am-241) source covered with different numbers of Mylar films. By irradiating various scintillators, including GAGG, GGAG, YAP(Ce), and plastic scintillator, with alpha particles of different energies, we measured and evaluated the non-proportional response of these scintillators. We then compared the measured response as a function of incident energy to a simulation, which assumes a proportional response to evaluate the non-proportionality. For all the scintillators tested, non-proportionality was observed; the light output per MeV at 1.8 MeV ranged from 0.60 to 0.81 of the values observed at 5.2 MeV. The non-proportional response was largest for plastic scintillator (0.60) and smallest for GAGG (0.81). We conclude that the proposed method could be an efficient means of measuring the non-proportionality of scintillators between light output and alpha particle energies