Study on Scintillation Properties of Several Non-fluoride Halides under Low Energy²⁴¹ Am radiation

A few of halide inorganic scintillation crystals have been applied as radiation detection materials and are playing important roles in nuclear medicine, high energy physics, security inspection, petroleum logging and so on, but most of them are on the way of research and development. In this paper, a series of novel halide scintillation crystals, LaBr₃(Ce), LaCl₃(Ce), SrI₂(Eu), Cs₂LiYCl₆(Ce) and NaI(Tl) were studied using low energy 241Am radioactive source. The effect of reflective film thickness on low-energy ray transmittance and light output of encapsulated scintillators was investigated, Teflon thickness of 0.48 mm as reflective film is best choice to obtain higher light collection and better radiation transmittance. Among all these crystals, LaBr₃(Ce) crystal has excellent energy resolution above 25keV gamma ray radiation, 9.3% at 26.34 keV, 8.4% at 59.54 keV and2.6% at 661.66 keV. Only NaI (Tl) crystal works fine below 25 keV X-rays radiation, with energy resolution of 17.68% at 13.9 keV, 14.16% at 17.8 keV and 13.42% at 20.8 keV. (paper)