Ion-induced degradation of BC-418 scintillation yield

Abstract We report results concerning the degradation of the scintillation yield of the plastic scintillator BC-418 under ion beam irradiation. Lithium, carbon and iodine ions have been used at different energies. For each ion the decrease of the scintillation yield, as a function of fluence, can be described by summation of several exponential functions. The scintillation yield at low fluence can be described by a model taking into account the energy deposited by secondary electrons, which leads to an evaluation of the quenching density for this scintillator between 0.2 and 0.7 erg/cm 3 .