Water-Based Scintillators for Large-Scale Liquid Calorimetry

We have investigated primary and secondary solvent intermediates in search of a recipe to create a bulk liquid scintillator with water as the bulk solvent and common fluors as the solutes. As we are not concerned with energy resolution below 1 MeV in large-scale experiments, light-output at the 10% level of high-quality organic solvent based scintillators is acceptable. We have found encouraging performance from industrial surfactants as primary solvents for PPO and POPOP. This technique may allow economical and environmentally safe bulk scintillator for kiloton-sized high energy calorimetry.