Scintillation Properties of Garnets and Oxyorthosilicates With Different Dopants

The development of novel scintillators for ionizing radiation detectors is still playing a significant role in high-energy physics, medical, and homeland security applications. New detector concepts require a unique combination of material properties such as rising and decay times, and light output, and in the case of collider experiments, the radiation hardness cerium-doped garnet-type scintillation materials have been intensively developed in the last few years. Among them, Y₃Al₅O₁₂ (YAG), Lu₃Al₅O₁₂ (LuAG), and Gd₃Al₂Ga₃O₁₂ (GAGG) with high radiation hardness recognized for both gamma and proton irradiation were found to be the most promising materials. Many modern detector systems based on scintillation materials require high-count rates. This involves the use of bright scintillators with fast rise and decay times in combination with modern ultrafast photodetectors such as silicon photo multipliers (SiPMs). A possible solution for such kind of applications is a family of lutetium–yttrium oxyorthosilicates (Lu_2(1-x)Y_2xSiO₅, LSO, LYSO, and YSO). Here, we report on the characterization of different types of garnets with various dopants and in shapes of pixels and bulk and on the study of properties of LSO, LYSO, YSO solely doped by Ce, as well as LYSO materials with Ca and Mg co-doping from different producers.