Luminescent layers for ion-photon emission microscopy

Abstract

Ion beam induced luminescence (IBIL) combined with ion beam induced charge collection (IBICC) is applied in a quantitative study of the IBIL generation yield and detection efficiency for several plastic phosphor materials. The main purpose of this study is to search for strongly luminescence materials that can be used to easily coat samples to be studied with ion-photon emission microscopy (IPEM). A special focus is given to plastic scintillation materials because thin films are easily prepared, and such films have already been used for single event triggering. The emission yield was found to be low for typical Bicron plastic phosphors (only ∼70 photons/ion/μm). The total collection, transmission and photon detection efficiency of the optical microscope used in this study was determined to be only ∼0.00003. For thin film plastic phosphors ∼20 μm thick, the detection efficiency was only 0.04 photons/ion. This means that using these plastics, IPEM would need to be performed with ∼20× more beam fluence to obtain data, such as IBICC, similar to a standard scanned nuclear microprobe. Improvements are discussed.