Abstract
Abstract
It is known that scintillators exhibit non-proportional
behavior between light output and the energy of gamma photons or
beta particles. However, the non-proportionality between light
output in scintillators and the energy of alpha particles has not
been extensively measured, likely due to the challenges associated
with preparing alpha particles with varying energies. To address
this issue, we propose a novel method to modulate the energy of
alpha particles using an americium-241 (Am-241) source covered with
different numbers of Mylar films. By irradiating various
scintillators, including GAGG, GGAG, YAP(Ce), and plastic
scintillator, with alpha particles of different energies, we
measured and evaluated the non-proportional response of these
scintillators. We then compared the measured response as a function
of incident energy to a simulation, which assumes a proportional
response to evaluate the non-proportionality. For all the
scintillators tested, non-proportionality was observed; the light
output per MeV at 1.8 MeV ranged from 0.60 to 0.81 of the values
observed at 5.2 MeV. The non-proportional response was largest
for plastic scintillator (0.60) and smallest for GAGG (0.81). We
conclude that the proposed method could be an efficient means of
measuring the non-proportionality of scintillators between light
output and alpha particle energies