Probing the Concepts of Photonic Crystals on Scintillating Materials

The high refractive index of current scintillating materials puts severe restrictions on their effective light yield. In this paper, we describe an approach that uses a photonic crystal pattern machined into the coupling face of the scintillator to partly overcome the problem of total internal reflection. Simulations are performed for 2 mm times 2 mm times 8 mm LuAP and LSO pixels with and without photonic crystal and different types of wrapping. It is shown that by tuning the structure of the photonic crystal and the size of its elements, the extraction efficiency of the surface can be significantly improved compared to a plain exit surface.