Characterization of a cylindrical plastic {\beta}-detector with Monte Carlo simulations of optical photons

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to accurately model a cylindrical plastic beta-detector's optical photon production and transport, improving the match with experimental spectra and enabling efficient response function calculations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel simulation approach that incorporates optical photon transport to better reproduce experimental spectra of a plastic beta-detector, and develops a method to efficiently convert energy depositions into light signals.

Findings

Optical photon simulation reproduces experimental spectral shapes.

A conversion method links energy deposition to light collection based on interaction points.

Enhanced simulation accuracy aids in spectrometer response calculations.

Abstract

In this work we report on the Monte Carlo study performed to understand and reproduce experimental measurements of a new plastic \b{eta}-detector with cylindrical geometry. Since energy deposition simulations differ from the experimental measurements for such a geometry, we show how the simulation of production and transport of optical photons does allow one to obtain the shapes of the experimental spectra. Moreover, taking into account the computational effort associated with this kind of simulation, we develop a method to convert the simulations of energy deposited into light collected, depending only on the interaction point in the detector. This method represents a useful solution when extensive simulations have to be done, as in the case of the calculation of the response function of the spectrometer in a total absorption {\gamma}-ray spectroscopy analysis.