Three-dimensional finely grained plastic scintillator detectors bring many advantages in particle detectors, allowing a massive active target which enables a high-precision tracking of interaction products, excellent calorimetry and a sub-nanosecond time resolution. Whilst such detectors can be scaled up to several-tonnes, as required by future neutrino experiments, a relatively long production time, where each single plastic-scintillator element is independently manufactured and machined, together with potential challenges in the assembly, complicates their realisation. In this manuscript we propose a novel design for 3D granular scintillator detectors where O(1cm3) cubes are efficiently glued in a single block of scintillator after being produced via cast polymerization, which can enable rapid and cost-efficient detector construction. This work could become particularly relevant for the detectors of the next-generation long-baseline neutrino-oscillation experiments, such as DUNE, Hyper-Kamiokande and ESSnuB.
@article{arxiv.2108.11897,
title = {Demonstrating a single-block 3D-segmented plastic-scintillator detector},
author = {A. Boyarintsev and A. De Roeck and S. Dolan and A. Gendotti and B. Grynyov and U. Kose and S. Kovalchuk and T. Nepokupnaya and A. Rubbia and D. Sgalaberna and T. Sibilieva and X. Y. Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.11897},
year = {2021}
}