Article | REF: E6347 V1

Inorganic scintillating materials

Author: Christophe DUJARDIN

Publication date: April 10, 2018, Review date: April 30, 2018

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


Overview

Français

ABSTRACT

Scintillating materials can be viewed as energy converters. They are used in a wide range of applications. The science involved spans materials chemistry, solid-state physics and detection engineering. This article describes the scintillation concept, the quality criteria for these materials with respect to expected performance, and applications. A focus is made on the complex energy relaxation processes, which allow the conversion of ionizing radiation of several keV into hundreds or thousands of visible photons of a few eV. To conclude, a few important ongoing research topics are described.

Read this article from a comprehensive knowledge base, updated and supplemented with articles reviewed by scientific committees.

Read the article

AUTHOR

  • Christophe DUJARDIN: Professor at the Institut Lumière Matière - UMR 5306 CNRS-Université Lyon 1, Villeurbanne, France

 INTRODUCTION

Seeing what cannot be seen is the main goal of a scintillating material, which converts the energy deposited by an X or γ -ray, but also from other ionizing particles such as electrons or neutrons, into visible light (or Ultra-Violet and Infrared). Each induced flash of light can be then detected using a traditional photodetector. The scintillator is thus a key element of ionizing radiation detectors. They are widely used in various societal sectors such as medical imaging, homeland security or oil drilling. A wide range of scintillator types exist. Some of them have reached technological maturity and are already on the market at a large scale, others are more exploratory and are only prepared and studied in labs. This wide choice of materials is due to the wide range of performance and parameters required for the various applications.

After defining scintillation and the various ways of using it, this review discusses the scope of the different applications and the related societal fields using these converting materials. It then aims to explain to the reader, as a potential end-user of scintillating materials, the role and impact of the various quality criteria. Depending on the target applications, these parameters are ranked in terms of importance. The various ionizing radiation interactions with matter are described since it plays a major role in material selection. In the second section, the theoretical bases of the energy relaxation processes are described. Being rather complex, this description is not essential for understanding the first part. Nevertheless, it becomes of interest for material scientists. Indeed, a tiny change in the material may lead to huge consequences for performance. The optimization of performance and the synthesis processes thus require a good overview of these mechanisms, which include energy transfers as well as luminescence. The conclusion gives an overview of current developments and research on this topic. A glossary as well as a table of the symbols is presented at the end of the article.

You do not have access to this resource.

Exclusive to subscribers. 97% yet to be discovered!

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference

A Comprehensive Knowledge Base, with over 1,200 authors and 100 scientific advisors
+ More than 10,000 articles and 1,000 how-to sheets, over 800 new or updated articles every year
From design to prototyping, right through to industrialization, the reference for securing the development of your industrial projects

KEYWORDS

medical imaging   |   ionizing radiation detection   |   energy convecters


This article is included in

Healthcare technologies

This offer includes:

Knowledge Base

Updated and enriched with articles validated by our scientific committees

Services

A set of exclusive tools to complement the resources

Practical Path

Operational and didactic, to guarantee the acquisition of transversal skills

Doc & Quiz

Interactive articles with quizzes, for constructive reading

Subscribe now!

Ongoing reading
Inorganic scintillating materials