Quenching the scintillation in CF4 Cherenkov gas radiator

CF4 is used as a Cherenkov gas radiator in one of the Ring Imaging Cherenkov detectors at the LHCb experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. CF4 is well known to have a high scintillation photon yield in the near and far VUV, UV and in the visible wavelength range. A large flux of scintillation photons in our photon detection acceptance between 200 and 800 nm could compromise the particle identification efficiency. We will show that this scintillation photon emission system can be effectively quenched, consistent with radiationless transitions, with no significant impact on the photons resulting from Cherenkov radiation. & 2015 CERN for the benefit of the Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).