Growth and scintillation properties of F-doped PWO crystals

The application of PbWO4-based scintillators in inexpensive positron emission tomography is strongly limited by their poor light yield; an effort has been made at the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics to overcome this problem. By using F ion doped, a factor of 2.5 increase of the light yield (within 200 ns) can be achieved compared with undoped PbWO4 crystals. X-ray diffraction patterns, transmittance, luminescence (X-ray and UV excited) spectra and light yield measurements of PWO:F crystals are presented. This increase of fast scintillation component of PbWO4 may open up a wide field of practical applications in medical imaging.