An Analysis of the Light Yield in a Plastic Scintillator as a Function of the Electron Energy

Abstract

While preparing for an experiment on the search for neutrinoless double β decay of ¹⁵⁰Nd nuclei, the spectrometric properties of polystyrene were investigated, including the dependence of the photomultiplier pulse amplitude on the energy of detected electrons. It is shown that a good description of experimental data is attained by taking the energy loss in passive materials, changes in the ionization density at low energies, and additional light due to Cherenkov radiation generated in polystyrene into account.