New inorganic scintillation materials development for medical imaging

As already advertised for several years, Lu-based compounds doped with trivalent Ce seem to be the most promising scintillators for a new generation of positron emission tomography scanners. Two crystals, namely LSO: Ce and LuAP : Ce, are under intensive study, but there is still an interest in searching for materials with a better combination of price/performance. In the study reported in this paper, we paid attention to the compounds containing rare earth and Ba, Hf. Another motivation was an increase of the effective charge of the host matrix and a decrease of the Lu fraction in compound. In this paper, we discuss spectroscopic properties of several new heavy compounds such as Lu₂Hf₂O₇, La₂Hf₂O₇ and Ba₃Lu₄O₉ doped with Ce.