There is increasing necessity for low background active materials as ton-scale, rare-event and cryogenic detectors are developed. Poly(ethylene-2,6-naphthalate) (PEN) has been considered for these applications because of its robust structural characteristics, and its scintillation light in the blue wavelength region. Radioluminescent properties of PEN have been measured to aid in the evaluation of this material. In this article we present a measurement of PEN's quenching factor using three different neutron sources; neutrons emitted from spontaneous fission in 252Cf, neutrons generated from a DD generator, and neutrons emitted from the 13C(α,n)16O and the 7Li(p,n)7Be nuclear reactions. The fission source used time-of-flight to determine the neutron energy, and the neutron energy from the nuclear reactions was defined using thin targets and reaction kinematics. The Birk's factor and scintillation efficiency were found to be kB=0.12±0.01 mm MeV−1 and S=1.31±0.09 MeVee MeV−1 from a simultaneous analysis of the data obtained from the three different sources. With these parameters, it is possible to evaluate PEN as a viable material for large-scale, low background physics experiments.
@article{arxiv.2204.02866,
title = {Light Response of Poly(ethylene 2,6-napthalate) to Neutrons},
author = {Brennan Hackett and Richard deBoer and Yuri Efremenko and Michael Febbraro and Jason Nattress and Dan Bardayan and Chevelle Boomershine and Kristyn Brandenburg and Stefania Dede and Joseph Derkin and Ruoyu Fang and Adam Fritsch and August Gula and Gyurky Gyorgy and Gula Hamad and Yenuel Jones-Alberty and Beka Kelmar and Khachatur Manukyan and Miriam Matney and John McDonaugh and Shane Moylan and Patrick O'Malley and Shahina Shahina and Nisha Singh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.02866},
year = {2024}
}