Scintillation plastic is very much a thing. Big accelerators, like CERN or Fermilab, used to use long, floppy strips of plastic attached to a photomultiplier tube, which goes to the counters. I believe they still use scintillator detectors farther from the collision region, but the trend has been to move towards silicon pixel detectors closer in.
One thing with scintillators though: You're typically detecting a few photons at a time, so a photomultiplier tube (PMT) is really required for any kind of reasonable SNR with any kind of reasonable temporal resolution.
> Those counters were photomultiplier tubes.
A PMT is actually not a counter (but they are normally used with a counter). It's just a transducer that produces electrical charge at the output in response to photons at the input.
Normally the PMT is connected to a "discriminator" (very fast voltage threshold detector, with adjustable threshold(s)) which takes the very narrow pulses (~2-3 ns) from the PMT and stretches them into pulses with fixed rise time, width and voltage. Those pulses are then counted using whatever hardware you can dream up.
A PMT is really just an electron multiplier with a photocathode in front, so you have all the same issues as you do with electron multipliers and thus use a discriminator for all the same reasons (mainly to remove "runt pulses" that didn't originate from a photon at the input window). Normally you'd use a single level discriminator, but "multi-channel" ones exist also.
Having an adjustable threshold on the discriminator is important to maximize SNR because the electron multiplier within the PMT will wear out and produce smaller pulses, and there can be significant variation in pulse size across serial numbers.
> Rutherford refused to use a counter while he could show his trained workers (women mainly) were as accurate.
I'm skeptical of this account, and the only thing I can find with a quick Google is that Rutherford hired women to count scintillation events because he could pay them less than men(-counters).
One thing with scintillators though: You're typically detecting a few photons at a time, so a photomultiplier tube (PMT) is really required for any kind of reasonable SNR with any kind of reasonable temporal resolution.
> Those counters were photomultiplier tubes.
A PMT is actually not a counter (but they are normally used with a counter). It's just a transducer that produces electrical charge at the output in response to photons at the input.
Normally the PMT is connected to a "discriminator" (very fast voltage threshold detector, with adjustable threshold(s)) which takes the very narrow pulses (~2-3 ns) from the PMT and stretches them into pulses with fixed rise time, width and voltage. Those pulses are then counted using whatever hardware you can dream up.
A PMT is really just an electron multiplier with a photocathode in front, so you have all the same issues as you do with electron multipliers and thus use a discriminator for all the same reasons (mainly to remove "runt pulses" that didn't originate from a photon at the input window). Normally you'd use a single level discriminator, but "multi-channel" ones exist also.
Having an adjustable threshold on the discriminator is important to maximize SNR because the electron multiplier within the PMT will wear out and produce smaller pulses, and there can be significant variation in pulse size across serial numbers.
> Rutherford refused to use a counter while he could show his trained workers (women mainly) were as accurate.
I'm skeptical of this account, and the only thing I can find with a quick Google is that Rutherford hired women to count scintillation events because he could pay them less than men(-counters).