Additive manufacturing of a 3D-segmented plastic scintillator detector for tracking and calorimetry of elementary particles.

Plastic scintillators, segmented into small, optically isolated voxels, are used for detecting elementary particles and provide reliable particle identification with nanosecond time resolution. Building large detectors requires the production and precise alignment of millions of individual units, a process that is time-consuming, cost-intensive, and difficult to scale. Here, we introduce an additive manufacturing process chain capable of producing plastic-based scintillator detectors as a single, monolithic structure.