Weber Tim, Boyarintsev Andrey, Kose Umut, Li Botao, Sgalaberna Davide, Sibilieva Tetiana, Wüthrich Johannes, Berns Siddartha, Boillat Eric, De Roeck Albert, Dieminger Till, Franks Matthew, Grynyov Boris, Hugon Sylvain, Jaeschke Carsten, Rubbia André
Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland.
Institute for Scintillation Materials (ISMA), National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Commun Eng. 2025 Mar 5;4(1):41. doi: 10.1038/s44172-025-00371-z.
Plastic scintillators, segmented into small, optically isolated voxels, are used for detecting elementary particles and provide reliable particle identification with nanosecond time resolution. Building large detectors requires the production and precise alignment of millions of individual units, a process that is time-consuming, cost-intensive, and difficult to scale. Here, we introduce an additive manufacturing process chain capable of producing plastic-based scintillator detectors as a single, monolithic structure. Unlike previous manufacturing methods, this approach consolidates all production steps within one machine, creating a detector that integrates and precisely aligns its voxels into a unified structure. By combining fused deposition modeling with an injection process optimized for fabricating scintillation geometries, we produced an additively manufactured fine-granularity plastic scintillator detector with performance comparable to the state of the art, and demonstrated its capabilities for 3D tracking of elementary particles and energy-loss measurement. This work presents an efficient and economical production process for manufacturing plastic-based scintillator detectors, adaptable to various sizes and geometries.
塑料闪烁体被分割成小的、光学隔离的体素，用于探测基本粒子，并以纳秒级的时间分辨率提供可靠的粒子识别。构建大型探测器需要生产和精确对准数百万个单个单元，这一过程既耗时、成本高，又难以扩展规模。在此，我们介绍一种增材制造工艺链，它能够将基于塑料的闪烁体探测器制造成单个整体结构。与以前的制造方法不同，这种方法将所有生产步骤整合在一台机器内，制造出一种探测器，该探测器将其体素集成并精确对准到一个统一的结构中。通过将熔融沉积建模与针对制造闪烁体几何形状优化的注塑工艺相结合，我们制造出了一种增材制造的细粒度塑料闪烁体探测器，其性能与现有技术相当，并展示了其对基本粒子进行三维跟踪和能量损失测量的能力。这项工作提出了一种用于制造基于塑料的闪烁体探测器的高效且经济的生产工艺，该工艺可适应各种尺寸和几何形状。
