Accurate measurement of the rise and decay times of fast scintillators with solid state photon counters

In this work we present a measurement setup for the determination of scintillation pulse shapes of fast scintillators. It is based on a time-correlated single photon counting approach that utilizes the correlation between 511 keV annihilation photons to produce start and stop signals in two separate crystals. The measurement is potentially cost-effective and simple to set up while maintaining an excellent system timing resolution of 125 ps. As a proof-of-concept the scintillation photon arrival time histograms were recorded for two well-known, fast scintillators: LYSO:Ce and LaBr 3 :5%Ce. The scintillation pulse shapes were modeled as a linear combination of exponentially distributed charge transfer and photon emission processes. Correcting for the system timing resolution, the exponential time constants were extracted from the recorded histograms. A decay time of 43 ns and a rise time of 72 ps were determined for LYSO:Ce thus demonstrating the capability of the system to accurately measure very fast rise times. In the case of LaBr 3 :5%Ce two processes were observed to contribute to the rising edge of the scintillation pulse. The faster component (270 ps) contributes with 72% to the rising edge of the scintillation pulse while the second, slower component (2.0 ns) contributes with 27%. The decay of the LaBr 3 :5%Ce scintillation pulse was measured to be 15.4 ns with a small contribution (2%) of a component with a larger time constant (130 ns).