This website is an extended version of a library created by Stephen Derenzo, Martin Boswell, Marvin Weber, and Kathleen Brennan at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with support from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The site is currently maintained by Bethany Goldblum and Thibault Laplace at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley with support from the Nuclear Data Subprogram within the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Nuclear Physics Program and the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research & Development (DNN R&D) through the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium.
If you have or know of an article containing scintillator information that has not been included and would like to suggest a candidate material, please send us a copy of the article (the preferred format is PDF). You are also invited to provide information for the different property columns.
Inorganic Scintillator Library
The data in the Inorganic Library corresponds in part to a website originally created by Stephen Derenzo, Martin Boswell, Marvin Weber, and Kathleen Brennan at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with support from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Their project focused on the discovery of new inorganic scintillators by rapid synthesis and characterization of candidate materials in microcrystal (powder) form. For a description of their facility, see S.E. Derenzo, et al., “Design and Implementation of a Facility for Discovering New Scintillator Materials,” IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., 55 (2008) 1458-1463.
Rationale for Data Inclusion/Exclusion:
- Only measurements made with ionizing radiation (e.g., electrons, x-rays, gamma rays) have been included. Many strongly fluorescent materials are poor scintillators. In these, photons can excite luminescent ions efficiently, but the electrons and holes produced by ionizing radiation are unable to do the same.
- Measurements of crystalline powders are included because: (1) many scintillation materials are useful in powder form (e.g., x-ray intensifier screens), and (2) a material in powder form can provide a qualitative measurement of the luminosity as well as good measurements of the temporal response and the scintillation emission spectrum. It is hoped that powders with promising data will prompt the production of single crystals that can be used for high quality measurements of luminosity and proportionality.
- Materials with a dominant decay time greater than 10 microseconds have not been included, since these would be less useful in nuclear radiation detectors.
Organic Scintillator Library
In 2023, Bethany Goldblum, Thibault Laplace, and Leila Shook expanded the library to include organic scintillators with support from the DOE Office of Science, Nuclear Physics/Nuclear Data Program and DOE NNSA DNN R&D through the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium. The development of the Organic Scintillator Library was motivated in part by a community need for quenching data for use in simulations of scintillator-based detection systems as well as a study of ionization quenching in scintillating media that highlighted the limitations of existing theoretical and semi-empirical models in predicting scintillator light yield. For more information on the model study, see T.A. Laplace, B.L. Goldblum, et al., “Modeling ionization quenching in organic scintillators,” Materials Advances 3 (2022) 5871-5881.
Rationale for Data Inclusion/Exclusion: The data are currently limited to commercially available materials with a focus on ionization quenching. Materials in development and other properties will be added in the future.
