Microstructured Plastic Scintillators For Beam Profiling In Medical Accelerators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new microstructured plastic scintillator beam profiler for medical accelerators, demonstrating its effective use in proton therapy with high profile rates and good agreement with simulations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel microstructured scintillation resin detector with a microfabricated PDMS mold, enabling high-rate beam profiling in medical accelerators.

Findings

Achieved profile rates over 7 kHz.

Good agreement between experimental results and simulations.

Validated the detector's effectiveness for proton therapy beams.

Abstract

A novel beam profiler based on microstructured scintillation resin is presented. The detector consists of a bundle of waveguides, with an active area of 30 x 30 mm$^2$ and a pitch of 400 $\mu$m, obtained by molding a scintillating resin into a microfabricated PDMS mold. A first prototype, coupled to an array of photodiodes and readout electronics, which potentially allows profile rates of more than 7 kHz, has been tested using both a UV source and a proton beam accelerated at different energies, such as those typically used in proton therapy. The results obtained during the experimental test campaigns were compared with theoretical simulations showing a good agreement with the modeling expectations, thus confirming the validity of this novel design for microstructured scintillating detectors.