Studies of scintillator response to 60 MeV protons in a proton beam imaging system

A Proton Beam Imaging System (ProBImS) is under development at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN). The ProBImS will be used to optimize beam delivery at IFJ PAN proton therapy facilities, delivering two-dimensional distributions of beam profiles. The system consists of a scintillator, optical tract and a sensitive CCD camera which digitally records the light emitted from the proton-irradiated scintillator. The optical system, imaging data transfer and control software have already been developed. Here, we report preliminary results of an evaluation of the DuPont Hi-speed thick back screen EJ 000128 scintillator to determine its applicability in our imaging system. In order to optimize the light conversion with respect to the dose locally deposited by the proton beam in the scintillation detector, we have studied the response of the DuPont scintillator in terms of linearity of dose response, uniformity of light emission and decay rate of background light after deposition of a high dose in the scintillator. We found a linear dependence of scintillator light output vs. beam intensity by showing the intensity of the recorded images to be proportional to the dose deposited in the scintillator volume.