Lecture “ Inorganic scintillation materials: R&D state-of-art and trends”

Inorganic scintillation materials: R&D state-of-art and trends

Martin Nikl

Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of The Czech Republic, Prague
Scintillation materials are employed to detect x-ray and gamma-ray photons, accelerated charged particles or even neutrons. Inorganic wide band-gap semiconductor or insulator single crystals are extensively explored for this purpose. Scintillator accomplish the fast and efficient transformation of incoming high energy photon/particle in a number of electron-hole pairs which radiatively recombine at suitable luminescence centers in the material. Generated UV or visible light can be then detected with high sensitivity by conventional solid state semiconductor- or photomultiplier-based photodetectors.
In our laboratories the first single crystal scintillator studies date back to early 1990’s when YAlO3 and later on the high density LuAlO3 aluminum perovskites and CeF3 were studied in the frame of new Crystal Clear Collaboration coordinated from CERN and focused on new materials for high energy physics (HEP) and medical instrumentation detectors. Later on, high density PbWO4 became the choice for HEP and was used in LHC accelerator in CERN at which the Higgs boson has been recently discovered. Beginning of new millennium brought heavy garnet scintillators based on Lu3Al5O12 crystals and in 2010 new class of ultra-efficient multicomponent garnets based on (Gd,Lu,Y)3(Al,Ga)5O12 solid solution. All these perovskite and garnet scintillators are doped with Ce3+, eventually by Pr3+, to explore their fast 5d-4f emission transition which gives rise to scintillator response dominated by few-to-several tens of nanoseconds decay time. The most recent activities include the research of nanocomposite and nanostructured materials with the aim to create superfast scintillators with the response below 1 ns usable for fast timing in time-of-flight techniques in high energy physics and medical imaging. In this talk the review of state-of-art activities in the field of selected scintillator materials will be provided with existing trends for near future.

Additional Details

Organizer:
Dr. Luigi Montalto, SIMAU
Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, ITALY
in collaboration with Italy Chapter of the IEEE Sensors Council
For information please contact: l.montalto@univpm.it