Low-Stress Growth of Cesium Barium Iodide Scintillators

The recent discovery of Eu activated alkali-earth halide scintillators promises to revolutionize remote detection and identification of radioisotopes. This proposal addresses the development of methods for production of large-volume, high-quality CsBa2I5scintillators. High-quality, low-cost scintillators for detection of gamma-rays are needed for monitoring of nuclear non-proliferation and homeland security. The same scintillators can be used to significantly improve the performance and lower the cost of applications involving X-ray detection in nuclear medicine imaging and diagnostics , X-ray detectors for non-destructive testing, and environmental contamination monitoring. The work proposed here promises to result in production of scintillators for government and commercial applications with much higher performance and at much lower cost than currently available.