Performance of plastic scintillators in particle detection

Plastic scintillators are widely used in high-energy physics for particle detection. One example is the Forward Diffractive Detector (FDD), a sub-system of the newly-added trigger detector Fast Interaction Trigger (FIT), which was incorporated to the ALICE apparatus during a major upgrade for Runs 3 and 4. This work discusses the commissioning of the FDD and evaluates its performance in Run 3. In order to fulfill the increasing requirements on future scintillators such as ultrafast time response, low cost and good radiation hardness, novel materials and technologies need to be developed. To this end, the production of custom-made scintillators with inorganic CsPbBr$_{3}$ nanocrystals embedded in organic polystyrene and silicone matrices is discussed. As part of this thesis, a test bench was set up to use cosmic-ray muons to characterise the samples and study their performance.