Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-24-2025
Abstract
Additive manufacturing offers efficient production of plastic scintillators with nontrivial geometries using vat polymerization, allowing fabrication of geometries which would be difficult or even impossible to produce using conventional subtractive manufacturing. This work presents a novel photocurable scintillator formula that includes coumarin 450 as a tertiary dye to enable high-resolution 3D printing via the manipulation of the 405 nm cure light. Bulk photocured and 3D printed (with and without tertiary dye) samples were compared through observational assessment and spectral response. All samples showed pulse shape discrimination between neutron and gamma events. Inclusion of the tertiary dye has minimal impact on emission spectrum and light output, but significant impact on print resolution as shown by comparison of printed high-complexity geometries and feature resolution test objects. With the use of a cure-limiting dye, unsupported features — such as freestanding pillars — were resolvable down to 0.7 mm. Even finer resolution at or below 0.1 mm was achieved in fully supported, integrated structures printed with off-the-shelf 405 nm desktop 3D printer. Scintillators demonstrated a light output up to 50% of EJ-200 with a PSD figure of merit up to 1.35 at 0.9–1.1 MeVee.
Source Publication
Journal of Instrumentation (ISSN 1748-0221)
Recommended Citation
Moore, C. J., Febbraro, M., Manfredi, J. J., Wood, A., Rutstrom, D., Ruland, T., Hackett, B., & Hausladen, P. A. (2025). High-resolution 3D-printed plastic scintillators with tertiary dye. Journal of Instrumentation, 20(10), P10043. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/20/10/P10043
IOP citation format: C.J. Moore et al 2025 JINST 20 P10043
Comments
© 2025 The Authors.
Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of Sissa Medialab. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4). Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.