Scintillation properties of N2 and CF4 and performances of a scintillating ionization chamber

In this work, we studied the emission yields, decay times and coincidence resolving times (CRT) of two gases, nitrogen (N2) and tetrafluoromethane (CF4), used for particle detection in the context of fission products measurement. The set-up was made of an ionization chamber and two photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) placed front-to-front on each side of the active zone of the chamber. Using the photomultiplier tubes, the number of photoelectrons (phe) converted at the photocathodes from the scintillation processes in each gas was quantified and the scintillation time spectra were recorded. A scintillation emission yield of 24 phe MeV−1 with a decay time of τd=2.5ns in N2, and 225 phe MeV−1 with τd=6.2ns for CF4, has been measured. With our set-up, the coincidence resolving time (σ values) between the two PMTs have been measured using alpha particles at 1.4 ns and 0.34 ns for N2 and CF4, respectively.