The “3D printed Detector” (3DET) R&D Collaboration was formed in 2019 to develop new scintillator production techniques that involve additive manufacturing. The complexity of scintillator detectors is dramatically increasing: a fine segmentation needs to be combined with big volumes and particular geometries that, for instance, can both 3D track charged particles and precisely measure their energy loss in the detector to identifying their type. The standard scintillator production techniques require subtractive processes to achieve the required geometries. Hence, they are not optimal for the production of future detectors because issues in the overall detector manufacturing and assembly would arise.

Additive Manufacturing, used to design and create parts by adding material in a layer-wise fashion, opens a door to new automated processes that drastically simplify the construction of both plastic and metallic objects. Moreover, it is cheaper and quicker compared to conventional techniques because thanks to the possibility of performing tool-less operations.

Recent developments allow to fabricate parts for mass customization with multiple materials with high transparency, all features that must be found in scintillator-based particle detectors.

Left: polystyrene-based plastic scintillator 3D printed with the Fused Deposition Modeling technique.
Right: transparent scintillator and white reflector filaments used in FDM 3D printing.

The goal of the 3DET project is to exploit the state-of-the-art of Additive Manufacturing to 3D print scintillator to set the basis for the production of future particle detectors.

Prototypes of 3D printed plastic scintillator made a scintillating polystyrene core segmented by white optical reflector layers into several independent volumes. The right photograph shows the scintillation of polystyrene core when exposed to UV radiation.