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Initiator-free preparation and properties of polystyrene-based plastic scintillators

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Abstract

A series of polystyrene-based scintillators have been prepared by thermal polymerization without any initiators. To investigate the influence of the primary additive and wavelength shifter on the performance of plastic scintillator, two primary additives and four wavelength shifters were added to the scintillators, respectively. The results showed that 2,5-diphenyloxazole (PPO) and 5-phenyl-2-[4-(5-phenyl-1,3-oxazol-2-yl)phenyl]-1,3-oxazole (POPOP) were the most adequate fluorescent dyes for initiator-free preparation of the polystyrene-based scintillators. The plastic scintillator containing 1% PPO and 0.02% POPOP possessed the highest fluorescence intensity. Initiator-containing polystyrene-based scintillator with the same concentration of PPO and POPOP (1% PPO, 0.02% POPOP and 0.01% AIBN) was also prepared. The light yield of the plastic scintillator without any initiators is 83.49% relative to the value of the standard sample EJ-200, which is higher 8% than that of initiator-containing plastic scintillator. Moreover, compared with the standard sample EJ-200 with a decay time of 2.09 s, the decay time of the initiator-free and initiator-containing plastic scintillator was 1.80s and 1.86 s, respectively.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Scientific Research Fund of Sichuan Provincial Education Department (No.16ZB0146), Longshan Academic Talent Research Supporting Program of SWUST (No.18LZX552) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.51602267). We are grateful to Shenye Liu and Xing Zhang of the Laser Fusion Research Center of the China Academy of Engineering Physics for their help in the testing of decay time and light yield.

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Environmental Friendly Energy Materials & School of Material Science and Engineering, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, 621010, People’s Republic of China

    Yewei Xu, Hongyang Deng, Hong Lei & Guanjun Chang

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  1. Yewei Xu
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  2. Hongyang Deng
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Correspondence to Yewei Xu or Guanjun Chang.

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Xu, Y., Deng, H., Lei, H. et al. Initiator-free preparation and properties of polystyrene-based plastic scintillators. J Polym Res 26, 177 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10965-019-1838-x

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