Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Scintillation properties of Nd3+, Tm3+, and Er3+ doped LuF3 scintillators in the vacuum ultra violet region

2011; Elsevier BV; Volume: 659; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.nima.2011.08.056

1872-9576

Takayuki Yanagida, Noriaki Kawaguchi, Kentaro Fukuda, Shunsuke Kurosawa, Yutaka Fujimoto, Yoshisuke Futami, Yuui Yokota, Kojiro Taniue, H. Sekiya, H. Kubo, Akira Yoshikawa, T. Tanimori,

Nuclear Physics and Applications

In order to develop novel vacuum ultra violet (VUV) emitting scintillators, we grew Nd 0.5%, Tm 0.5%, and Er 0.5% doped LuF3 scintillators by the μ-pulling down method, because LuF3 has a very wide band gap and Nd3+, Tm3+, and Er3+ luminescence centers show fast and intense 5d–4f emission in VUV region. Transmittance and X-ray induced radioluminescence were studied in these three samples using our original spectrometer made by Bunkou-Keiki company. In the VUV region, transmittance of 20–60% was achieved for all the samples. The emission peaks appeared at approximately 180, 165, and 164 nm for Nd3+, Tm3+, and Er3+ doped LuF3, respectively. Using PMT R8778 (Hamamatsu), we measured their light yields under 241Am α-ray excitation. Compared with Nd:LaF3 scintillator, which has 33 photoelectrons/5.5 MeV α, Nd:LuF3 and Tm:LuF3 showed 900±90 and 170±20 ph/5.5 MeV-α, respectively. Only for the Nd doped one, we can detect 137Cs 662 keV γ-ray photoabsorption peak and the light yield of 1200±120 ph/MeV was measured. We also investigated their decay time profiles by picosecond pulse X-ray equipped streak camera, and the main decay component of Nd:LuF3 turned out to be 7.63 ns.