Crystal Growth and Scintillation Properties of Fluoride Scintillators

Fluoride single crystals have a wide band gap. Thus, we were interested in studying the scintillation properties of fluoride single crystals. We investigated the scintillation properties of fluoride crystals grown by the micro-pulling-down and annealing methods. The time required to grow crystals using these methods is lesser than that using conventional methods such as the Czochralski and Bridgman methods. Both ZnF2and PbF2exhibited small light outputs of less than 1,000 photons/MeV, while BaF2and CeF3exhibited light outputs of ~ 6,000 and ~ 2,000 photons/MeV, respectively. In addition, BaF2is a well-known fast scintillator, but it also has a slow component. We tested a BaF2crystal with a Ce/La co-dopant and observed the suppression of the slow component.