Suppression of Afterglow in Microcolumnar CsI:Tl by Codoping With Sm²⁺: Recent Advances

Microcolumnar CsI:Tl remains a highly desirable sensor for digital X-ray imaging due to its superior spatial resolution, bright emission, high absorption efficiency, and ready availability. Despite such obvious advantages, two characteristic properties of CsI:Tl undermine their use in clinical and high speed imaging: a persistent afterglow in its scintillation decay, and a hysteresis effect that distorts the scintillation yield after exposure to high radiation doses.In our earlier work we have discovered that the addition of 0.05 to 0.5 mol percent of Sm(2+) to crystals of CsI:Tl suppresses their afterglow by a factor of up to 50, even when subjected to a very high exposure of 120 R. This additive also diminishes hysteresis by an order of magnitude, which is a major accomplishment. Consequent- ly, our work is now focused on developing codoped microcolumnar CsI:Tl, Sm films that can potentially combine excellent properties of the current state-of-the-art CsI:Tl films with the reduced afterglow and hysteresis observed in codoped crystals. While our earlier attempts in CsI:Tl, Sm film fabrication, reported at the previous IEEE meeting, demonstrated obvious advantages of the approach, the recent work has succeeded in producing films that show improvement by at least a factor of 7 in afterglow and 150% in brightness compared to the standard CsI:Tl films. We report these important results in this paper, along with other recent advances in film growth and new imaging results.