Crystal Growth and Scintillation Properties of Fluoride Scintillators

Fluoride single crystals have a wide band gap. Thus, we were interested in studying the scintillation properties of fluoride single crystals. We investigated the scintillation properties of fluoride crystals grown by the micro-pulling-down and annealing methods. The time required to grow crystals using these methods is lesser than that using conventional methods such as the Czochralski and Bridgman methods. Both ZnF₂ and PbF₂ exhibited small light outputs of less than 1,000 photons/MeV, while BaF₂ and CeF₃ exhibited light outputs of ~ 6,000 and ~ 2,000 photons/MeV, respectively. In addition, BaF₂ is a well-known fast scintillator, but it also has a slow component. We tested a BaF₂ crystal with a Ce/La co-dopant and observed the suppression of the slow component.