Inorganic scintillators—a basic material for instrumentation in physics

Since more than 100 years inorganic scintillators provide an efficient signal for photon and particle detection up to the highest energies. The paper provides a short review on the application of the most common scintillator materials used in nuclear and high-energy physics. Based on the general requirements for energy and momentum measurement, as well as particle identification, typical examples of detector concepts and operated systems are presented.