PNNL

Abstract

Urgent need for new radiation detector materials with excellent energy resolution at room temperature has prompted research efforts on both accelerated materials discovery and efficient techniques that can investigate candidate materials to identify material properties relevant to detector performance. In this work, an ion-beam approach is demonstrated to obtain energy resolution in both semiconductor detectors and scintillators over a continuous energy range. For semiconductors, the energy resolution of a silicon detector was measured as a function of He+ ion energy, and the values from an extrapolation to high energies are in good agreement with the literature data from alpha measurements. For the scintillators, benchmark crystals of BGO, YAP(Ce) and CsI(Tl) subject to He+ irradiation were investigated, and the corresponding energy resolution is compared with gamma-ray tests on the same crystals. The agreement of energy resolution between the ion and gamma measurements indicates that the ion approach can be used to predict energy resolution of candidate materials in thin film form (a few tens ?m thick) or a small crystals (a few mm3), when large crystals necessary for gamma-ray testing are unavailable.