Low background scintillators to investigate rare processes

International audience; Many developments, researches on innovative materials and purification techniques have offered a wide set of inorganic scintillators to investigate many processes; further developments are still in progress. In particular, efforts to realize very low background detectors have opened their effective application to the search of rare processes deep underground. Several cases will be outlined offering—to some extent—a discussion of several inorganic crystal scintillators' performances and their potentiality for the future.