Scintillator slurries of barium fluoride sand and index matched liquids

The authors investigated some of the scintillation properties of small quantities of crushed and ground crystalline barium fluoride powders or sands, wetted with a variety of fluid solutions closely matched in refractive index to the barium fluoride, forming a clear scintillator slurry with a density of about 3.8 g/cm³ and a radiation length estimated to be about 2.8 cm. Some successful mixtures used novel liquid scintillators as the fluid base, providing a totally active scintillator detector matrix with a light output on a small sample about 30% of that produced by NaI. It is concluded that these heavy fluid or gel-like materials have the potential of creating relatively dense, short-radiation-length, fast, radiation-hard scintillators for large-scale calorimetric radiation detectors, with much lower cost than single-crystal detectors