Study of radiation hardness of Gd2SiO5 scintillator for heavy ion beam

Gd2SiO5 (GSO) scintillator has very excellent radiation resistance, a fast decay time and a large light yield. Because of these features, GSO scintillator is a suitable material for high radiation environment experiments such as those encountered at high energy accelerators. The radiation hardness of GSO has been measured with Carbon ion beams at the Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator in Chiba (HIMAC). During two nights of irradiation the GSO received a total radiation dose of 7 x 105 Gy and no decrease of light yield was observed. On the other hand an increase of light yield by 25% was observed. The increase is proportional to the total dose, increasing at a rate of 0.025%/Gy and saturating at around 1 kGy. Recovery to the initial light yield was also observed during the day between two nights of radiation exposure. The recovery was observed to have a slow exponential time constant of approximately 1.5 x 104 seconds together with a faster component. In case of the LHCf experiment, a very forward region experiment on LHC (pseudo-rapidity η > 8.4), the irradiation dose is expected to be approximately 100 Gy for 10 nb-1 of data taking at (s)1/2 = 14TeV. The expected increase in light yield of less than a few percent will not affect the LHCf measurement.