Ce:YAG — An Important Scintillation Crystal

Ce:YAG is an important scintillation crystal with excellent scintillation performance. It has high luminous efficiency and wide optical pulse. The biggest advantage is that its central wavelength of luminescence is 550nm, which can be effectively coupled with detection equipment such as silicon photodiodes. Compared with CsI scintillation crystal, Ce:YAG scintillation crystal has fast decay time, and Ce:YAG scintillation crystal has no deliquescence, high temperature resistance, and stable thermodynamic performance. It is mainly used in light particle detection, alpha particle detection, gamma ray detection and other fields. In addition, it can also be used in electron detection imaging (SEM), high-resolution microscopic imaging fluorescent screen and other fields. Due to the small segregation coefficient of Ce ions in YAG matrix (about 0.1), it is difficult to incorporate Ce ions into YAG crystals, and the difficulty of crystal growth increases sharply with the increase of crystal diameter.
Ce:YAG single crystal is a fast-decay scintillation material with excellent comprehensive properties, with high light output (20000 photons/MeV), fast luminous decay (~70ns), excellent thermomechanical properties, and luminous peak wavelength (540nm) It is well matched with the receiving sensitive wavelength of ordinary photomultiplier tube (PMT) and silicon photodiode (PD), good light pulse distinguishes gamma rays and alpha particles, Ce:YAG is suitable for detecting alpha particles, electrons and beta rays, etc. The good mechanical properties of charged particles, especially Ce:YAG single crystal, make it possible to prepare thin films with a thickness of less than 30um. Ce:YAG scintillation detectors are widely used in electron microscopy, beta and X-ray counting, electron and X-ray imaging screens and other fields.