Optical Properties of Quantum-Dot-Doped Liquid Scintillators

TL;DR

This paper investigates the optical properties of quantum-dot-doped liquid scintillators, focusing on their potential for neutrino detection and analyzing their stability, transparency, and energy transfer characteristics.

Contribution

It provides laboratory measurements of quantum dot optical properties and explores their suitability for large-scale neutrino detectors.

Findings

Quantum dots improve transparency after filtering.

Stable fluorescence properties observed in quantum dots.

Energy transfer between quantum dots and fluorophore demonstrated.

Abstract

Semiconductor nanoparticles (quantum dots) were studied in the context of liquid scintillator development for upcoming neutrino experiments. The unique optical and chemical properties of quantum dots are particularly promising for the use in neutrinoless double beta decay experiments. Liquid scintillators for large scale neutrino detectors have to meet specific requirements which are reviewed, highlighting the peculiarities of quantum-dot-doping. In this paper, we report results on laboratory-scale measurements of the attenuation length and the fluorescence properties of three commercial quantum dot samples. The results include absorbance and emission stability measurements, improvement in transparency due to filtering of the quantum dot samples, precipitation tests to isolate the quantum dots from solution and energy transfer studies with quantum dots and the fluorophore PPO.