Measurement of proton quenching in a LAB based liquid scintillator

TL;DR

This paper investigates proton quenching in a linear alkylbenzene-based liquid scintillator using a neutron generator to improve energy non-linearity models for neutrino detectors.

Contribution

It provides experimental measurements of proton quenching and extracts Birk's law parameters specific to LAB-based scintillators, enhancing detector modeling accuracy.

Findings

Proton quenching data obtained for energies 0.5-13 MeV.

Birk's law parameters characterized for LAB scintillator.

Improved understanding of energy non-linearity in neutrino detectors.

Abstract

Linear alkylbenzene has been recently used as the solvent of liquid scintillator by several neutrino experiments. The energy quenching effect of a linear alkylbenzene based liquid scintillator is studied in this paper with a 14 MeV D-T compact neutron generator, to improve the energy non-linearity modelling of this kind of detectors. The recoiled proton in the liquid scintillator has a kinetic energy ranging from 0.5 MeV to 13 MeV. The data is used to extract the parameters of the Birk's law, an empirical model to describe the energy quenching effect of the liquid scintillator.