Researchers of the Department of Nuclear Spectroscopy and Radiochemistry at the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems at JINR, in cooperation with Dubna State University, presented the first results of developing new tellurium-loaded plastic scintillators. Scintillators based on polystyrene, poly(methyl methacrylate), and their copolymers are designed for detectors that are used to search for and study neutrinoless double beta decay.

A complex compound of diphenyltellurium oxide with di-(2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric acid and diphenyltellurium di-2-ethylhexanoate were used as tellurium-containing additives. The conditions for obtaining samples and characteristics of their light yield and transparency were described in the article entitled “Tellurium-loaded plastic scintillators” and published in Instruments and Experimental Techniques in 2024.

The authors are Ivan Suslov, Igor Nemchenok, Alexander Klimenko, Artem Bystryakov, and Ilya Kamnev.

Neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) is the only process that allows scientists determine whether neutrinos are Dirac or Majorana particles. If decay is reliably registered, the neutrinos are Majorana particles, in other words, particles that are their own antiparticles. That will let scientific community study New physics beyond the Standard Model and provide an answer to one of the most relevant questions in modern physics: why does the Universe contain more matter than antimatter?

Many experiments worldwide, such as GERDA, KamLAND-Zen, LEGEND-200, and others, are dedicated to searching for neutrinoless double beta decay. A scientific teams from Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, USA, and other countries are involved in research based on the results of these experiments.