Kaleidoscopic-ray-tracing-based model of the scintillation flash energy deposition in the photomultipliers attached to a strip scintillator

Abstract

Strip scintillator detectors are used nowadays in many fields of applied physics, particularly in medicine, civil engineering, mapping of underground resources, and security. In this work we provide an analytical description of light transport in a cuboid-shaped strip scintillator detector from the scintillation location to the detecting surface. We use kaleidoscopic-ray-tracing approach to reproduce the average time profile of the energy deposition (light collection) in the detecting surface. We demonstrate the applicability of the model on the case of PWO crystal of $1.5\times 1.5 \times 30$ cm$^3$ size. We show that the results achieved in the model are in good agreement with Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. Notably, the developed model requires dozens of milliseconds to be implemented, thus, it is applicable for real-time calibration of the detector, while the MC simulation takes hours. Also, we highlight that the kaleidoscopic-ray-tracing itself being used in MC simulations can highly speed them up in the case of specular reflectors.