NaI:Tl,6Li-PVT composite scintillator toward neutron and gamma discrimination

Efficient and affordable scintillators with the capability of neutron (n) and gamma (gamma)-ray discrimination have become increasingly urgent for homeland security and radiation protection applications. In this work, a com-posite scintillator prototype made of NaI:Tl,6Li (NTL) single crystals and poly(vinyltoluene) (PVT) plastic scin-tillators was synthesized toward n and gamma rays discrimination. The composite scintillator, with a size of 53 mm diameter x 30 mm height, is comprised of four 12 mm x 12 mm x 20 mm rectangular cuboid NTL crystals encapsulated in a PVT-based plastic scintillator matrix. PVT enable the scalability of scintillator to large ge-ometries, and it also serves as light guide and wavelength shifter for NTL scintillation. The synthesized NTL-PVT composite has a high scintillation yield of 36,600 +/- 4000 photons/MeV (equivalent to stand-alone NTL crystals), and a decent n and gamma-ray pulse shape discrimination (PSD) capability with a figure-of-merit (FOM) of 1.2. These results highlight the feasibility of NTL-PVT composites as cost-effective scintillators with sufficient n and gamma-ray detection performance.