Glass and Quartz Microscintillators for CMOS Compatible Multi-Species Radiation Detection

This paper reports small scale radiation detectors sensitive to alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron radiation using glass and quartz doped with
¹⁰
B nanoparticles utilizing CMOS fabrication techniques. Two microscintillators have been fabricated and tested; one relies on sintered glass frit doped with boron nanoparticles; the other relies on diffused boron. Radiation impinging the scintillation matrix produces varying optical pulses which are differentiated by on-chip pulse height spectroscopy. The quartz substrates are more transparent to the wavelength of the created optical pulses, resulting in higher count rates when compared to glass.