Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
8172292 Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment 2015 7 Pages PDF
Abstract
The POLAR experiment is a joint Chinese-European project conceived for a precise measurement of gamma ray polarization and optimized for the detection of the prompt emission of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) in the energy range 50-500 keV. POLAR is a novel compact space-borne Compton polarimeter consisting of 1600 low-Z plastic scintillator bars (EJ-248M), read out by 25 flat-panel multi-anode photomultiplier tubes. In the paper, we first present a dedicated experiment to study the non-linear energy response of EJ-248M plastic scintillator bars to electrons and the detailed data analysis. Second we obtained the Birks' constant of EJ-248M plastic scintillator as kB=0.143mm/MeV by least squares fitting. Finally we used Geant4 simulation to study the influence of non-linear energy response on the performance of POLAR, through which it was found that non-linear energy response will lead to a significant decrease in statistics and result in larger uncertainty in polarization measurement. The paper presents a general solution to the study of non-linear energy response of plastic scintillators to electrons.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Physics and Astronomy Instrumentation
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