Blue Glow Of Scintillators

Plastic scintillators are used along with photosensors to detect the passage of subatomic particles. This array of scintillators was prepared by the Hyper-Kamiokande Winnipeg group for use in the CERN test beam to tag the energies of gamma rays that will be delivered to a prototype next generation of neutrino detector. An ultraviolet light shining on the scintillator causes the glow observed in the image. For the final detector the scintillators were coupled to light sensors and wrapped in black sheet, so that the only light seen by the sensors is from the scintillator.