ABSTRACT
Scintillators are materials—solids, liquids, gases— that produce sparks or scintillations of light when ionizing radiation passes through them. The method was abandoned for about 30 years and was remembered again when advanced electronics made possible amplification of the light produced in the scintillator. The amount of light produced in the scintillator is very small. It must be amplified before it can be recorded as a pulse or in any other way. The operation of a scintillation detector may be divided into two broad steps: absorption of incident radiation energy by the scintillator and production of photons in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum and amplification of the light by the photomultiplier tube and production of the output pulse. The luminescence of inorganic scintillators can be understood in terms of the allowed and forbidden energy bands of a crystal. During the past two decades, there has been an increasing usage of inorganic scintillators in a wide variety of materials research.
