Elimination of the effect of internal activity in LaCl3:Ce scintillator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an effective pulse shape discrimination method using fast digitizers to eliminate internal alpha and beta contamination effects in LaCl3:Ce scintillators, enhancing their suitability for rare-event detection.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel application of pulse shape discrimination with Monte Carlo simulations to remove intrinsic contamination effects in LaCl3:Ce scintillators.

Findings

Significant reduction in background events from alpha and beta activities.

Effective separation of contamination effects improves detector performance.

Supports use of LaCl3:Ce in low cross-section nuclear astrophysics experiments.

Abstract

The Lanthanum Halide scintillator detectors have been widely used for nuclear spectroscopy experiments because of their excellent energy and time resolutions. Despite having these advantages, the intrinsic alpha and beta contaminations in these scintillators pose a severe limitation in their usage in rare-event detections. In the present work, pulse shape discrimination (PSD) with a fast digitizer has been shown to be an efficient method to separate the effect of alpha contamination from the spectrum. The shape of the beta spectrum has been generated with the help of Monte Carlo based simulation code, and its contribution has been eliminated from the spectrum. The reduction in the background events generated by both intrinsic beta and alpha activities has been demonstrated. The present study will encourage the application of these detectors in low cross-section measurement experiments relevant to nuclear astrophysics.