Abstract
Three-dimensional finely grained plastic scintillator
detectors bring many advantages in particle detectors, allowing a
massive active target which enables a high-precision tracking of
interaction products, excellent calorimetry and a sub-nanosecond
time resolution. Whilst such detectors can be scaled up to
several-tonnes, as required by future neutrino experiments, a
relatively long production time, where each single
plastic-scintillator element is independently manufactured and
machined, together with potential challenges in the assembly,
complicates their realisation. In this manuscript we propose a novel
design for 3D granular scintillator detectors where
O(1 cm3) cubes are efficiently glued in a single block of
scintillator after being produced via cast polymerization, which can
enable rapid and cost-efficient detector construction. This work
could become particularly relevant for the detectors of the
next-generation long-baseline neutrino-oscillation experiments, such
as DUNE, Hyper-Kamiokande and ESSnuSB.