Measurement of Attenuation Length and Light Yield of Plastic Scintillating Fiber with Silicon Photomultiplier

As a key detector for high accurate time-of-flight measurement at the external target facility (ETF), the start-time detector is required to have high count rate, high time resolution, and position resolution and so on. Plastic scintillating fiber (PSF) is regarded as an ideal option for the improved scheme, and its performance parameters such as attenuation length and light yield will directly affect the final performance of the detector. In this paper, a test platform based on PSF and silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) was built, and the performance of SiPM SensL MicroFC-SMA-30035 and PSF Kuraray SCSF-78J was studied systematically. The measurement results show that the selected SiPM has excellent single photon detection ability, high gain and good gain linearity within the operation voltage range, and it has good linear response to incident photon. The attenuation length was also investigated. The core layer of the fiber has an effective attenuation length of 547.4 cm, while the cladding layer of the fiber has a shorter-value of 15.5 cm. The effective light yield of the selected PSF is about 552 photon/mm, and the actual value is about 968 photon/mm. The test results show that the selected PSF coupled with SiPM for readout meets the requirements of a new start-time detector.