Advances in the scintillation performance of LSO:Ce single crystals

We investigated the scintillation characteristics of 2186 LSO crystals that were cut from over 400 crystal boules. We measured the light output and energy resolution of all crystals and also measured the decay times of a broad sampling of the crystals. We observed a significant reduction in the variation of both light output and decay time in this population of crystals compared to the results previously published in 1998. The reduced variation in scintillation properties may be attributed to better control of the populations of the two Ce scintillation centers in LSO, as well as better control of the effect of quenching centers and the effects of Ce segregation during crystal growth.