Triplet harvesting plastic scintillators with neutron-gamma pulse shape discrimination

In this paper we report on plastic scintillators that contain organometallic iridium compounds as triplet harvesting complexes for neutron-gamma pulse shape discrimination (PSD). Our results show that these plastic scintillators have a relatively high light output (higher than BGO) and exhibit very good neutron-gamma PSD with a Figure-of-Merit of ≥ 2.0 at 2.5 MeVee cut-off energy. Under X-ray excitation, the radioluminescence spectrum exhibits a broad band between 400 and 650 nm peaking at 470 nm which is well-matched to bialkali photomultiplier tubes and UV-enhanced photodiodes. The scintillation decay due to Ir3+ luminescence is of the order of 1 us.