Lead sulfate scintillator crystal growth for PET applications

It has recently been shown that lead sulfate (PbSO₄) is a promising scintillator material for use in PET detector systems. However, for lead sulfate scintillators to be useful in such an application, a technique must be developed to grow large optical quality crystals of this material. This paper describes our research into the high-temperature solution growth of PbSO₄ crystals. We report on the systematic selection of solvent materials including KCl, LiCl, PbCl₂, Na₂SO₄ and Li₂SO₄. Our studies indicate that Na₂SO ₄ is the best solvent. With Na₂SO₄ as the flux, we obtained PbSO₄ single crystals of several millimeters in size by Bridgman crystal growth method. We employed ACRT (accelerated crucible rotation technique), to resolve the constitutional supercooling problem, thus increased the crystal yield and reduced the number of grains. Finally, we compared the scintillation properties of synthetic PbSO₄ crystals we grew with previous measurements on natural anglesite and other synthetic crystals, and found them nearly identical