EJ-20X, BC-40X, and NE-110 Quenching Data

Relative light yield in MeVee as a function of proton recoil energy from 0.047 to 6.6 MeV for organic plastic scintillators with a polyvinyltoluene (PVT) polymer base. Ionization quenching is a primary process occurring in the solvent/base of the material [Birks1964].¹ As such, the relative proton light yield in PVT-based plastics is expected to be the same for the materials presented here and other PVT-based plastics with low concentration of dopants and fluors. Note that discrepancies in the relative proton light yield have been observed for PSD-capable plastics [Laplace2020JINST15] which are expected to contain a higher fluor concentration [Zaitseva2012NIMA668].

The discrepancy between the different reported proton light yield measurements can be explained in part by differences in the integration lengths used to measure the light output [Brown2018JourApplPhys124, Laplace2020NIMA959], bias associated with characterization of the Compton edge used for light output calibration [Dietze1982NIMA193], and bias associated with the edge characterization method used by some authors [Weldon2020NIMA953]. Most often ignored, non-proportionality of the electron light yield [Payne2011IEEE58, Swiderski2012JINST7] may also introduce further biases in calibration/conversion to the MeVee light unit. In some cases, fit functions provided by the authors are shown in lieu of the original measurements due to challenges in extracting data points from the published graphs.

Additional quenching data are available at higher proton energies and for different recoil particles in the table below. Click the cells in the Reference column to view the paper from which the data is derived. The Data column will direct to a downloadable text file of the quenching data.

1. J. Birks, The Theory and Practice of Scintillation Counting. New York, NY, USA: Pergamon, 1964, pp. 447–450. ↩︎