Hot Wall Evaporation of High-Sensitivity, High-Resolution CeBr Scintillator

Research related to fabrication of novel lanthanide halide scintillators in large physical sizes, using time- and cost-efficient methods, has been an ongoing process. The principal emphasis is on fabrication to derive novel light-conserving morphologies that are required for room-temperature radioisotope identification and other demanding spectrographic and imaging applications. Our fabrication technique addresses each of the many serious limitations of current growth methods, allows rapid large-volume synthesis at a substantially reduced cost versus current techniques, and is equally effective for manufacturing other advanced inorganic and solid state semiconductor materials. Here we report on the growth of CeBr₃ scintillator using hot wall evaporation. Under favorable deposition conditions, this material could be grown in polycrystalline form suitable for spectroscopic applications, or even in the microcolumnar form desirable for high spatial resolution gamma ray imaging. The work carried out so far shows that films produced using this approach are self-activated and possess all of the excellent properties of their melt-grown crystal counterparts. The scintillation properties discussed in this report are relative light yield, energy resolution, spectroscopic emission, light emission uniformity and detection of alphas using as-deposited CeBr₃ specimen. This paper will further discuss fabrication technique and its advantages.