An Alternative Design for Large Scale Liquid Scintillator Detectors

Abstract: The construction of large-scale liquid scintillator detectors is complicated by the need to separate the scintillation region from photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) due to their intrinsic radioactivity. This is generally done using acrylic or nylon barriers, whose own activity can also lead to substantial reduction of the fiducial detection volume for a number of low energy (MeV) studies, and whose construction becomes increasingly difficult and expensive for larger detector volumes. Here we present an initial simulation study of an alternative geometric construction known as SLIPS (Stratified LIquid Plane Scintillator), which aims to avoid such physical barriers entirely by instead using layers of lipophobic liquids to separate PMTs from the scintillation region.