Radiation Damage and Recovery Mechanisms of Various Scintillators and Fibers

As the intensity frontier in high energy physics increases, new materials, tools, and techniques must be developed in order to accommodate the prolonged exposure of detectors to high amounts of radiation. It has been observed recently that many of the active media of detectors could survive to much lower radiation doses than initially expected. In addition to the challenges introduced by extremely high doses of radiation, there is also a significant lack of in-situ radiation damage recovery systems. In recent studies, we investigated the radiation damage to common plastic scintillators such as polyethylene naphthalate, and polyethylene terephthalate, a custom made elastomer based plastic scintillator, various special glasses and scintillating fibers together with their recovery mechanisms. Here we report on the irradiation studies and the investigation of the recovery mechanisms under various conditions.