Scintillation Properties of Halide Single Crystals
Summary
Halide single crystals constitute a versatile class of inorganic scintillators, prized for their high light yield, rapid response and tunable emission wavelengths. Typically based on alkali or alkaline‐earth metal halides—often in the form of perovskites, double perovskites or vacancy‐ordered frameworks—these materials convert ionising radiation into visible photons via the creation and radiative decay of excited states such as self-trapped excitons or activator ion centres. Key performance metrics include light yield (photons per unit energy), energy resolution (full-width at half-maximum relative to photopeak energy) and scintillation decay time. Advances in crystal‐growth techniques, defect engineering and host‐lattice design have extended operating temperature ranges, mitigated thermal quenching and reduced intrinsic background levels. Doping with rare-earth or transition metal ions (for example Ce³⁺, Eu²⁺, Tb³⁺) enables emission tuning and pulse-shape discrimination, while emerging vacancy-ordered halide perovskites combine high mass density with structural stability for applications in medical imaging, security screening and rare-event physics. Ongoing efforts target radiopurity enhancement, scalable low-temperature growth and mechanistic understanding of delayed recombination processes, with the ultimate aim of bespoke scintillators optimised for energy, timing and background suppression.
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Scintillation Properties of Halide Single Crystals publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in scintillation properties of halide single crystals across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Scintillation: Emission of light by a material when excited by ionising radiation.
Light yield: Number of photons emitted per unit of absorbed radiation energy.
Energy resolution: Ability of a detector to distinguish between different photon or particle energies, usually expressed as FWHM divided by peak energy.
Self-trapped exciton (STE): An exciton localised by lattice distortion, leading to characteristic luminescence.
Negative thermal quenching: Increase in scintillation output with rising temperature due to thermal activation of trapped charge carriers.
Vacancy-ordered perovskite: Crystal structure in which a regular arrangement of atomic vacancies contributes to an altered electronic environment and luminescent properties.
References
- Growth, structure, and temperature dependent emission processes in emerging metal hexachloride scintillators Cs 2 HfCl 6 and Cs 2 ZrCl 6. Dalton Transactions (2022).
- Luminescence from Self‐Trapped Excitons and Energy Transfers in Vacancy‐Ordered Hexagonal Halide Perovskite Cs2HfF6 Doped with Rare Earths for Radiation Detection. Advanced Optical Materials (2022).
- New studies on the radiopurity and performances of Cs2ZrCl6 crystal scintillators. Journal of Instrumentation (2024).
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