Lanthanum halide scintillators: Properties and applications

BrilLanCe®-350 and BrilLanCe®-380, Saint-Gobain Crystals’ trade-names for LaCl3:Ce and LaBr3:Ce are being brought to market under exclusive license to Delft and Bern Universities. We are reporting the properties of crystals produced with commercially viable processes and find they match others’ observations. These scintillators are bright (60,000 photons/MeV for LaBr3:Ce) and have very linear response, a combination that leads to very good energy resolution (<3% at 662 keV and about 6% at 122 keV for LaBr3:Ce). The materials also have fast scintillation decay times (<30 ns) which supports counting applications at very high rate. These fast light output properties also lead to very fast timing (<300 ps coincidence resolving time on 30 mm long pieces of LaBr3:Ce). These excellent properties are retained at high temperature with only moderate light loss (<10%) at 175 °C in both materials. The detectors carry natural background in La138 and Ac227, the latter having been substantially reduced in recent processing. BrilLanCe®-350 is now available in detectors up to 51 mm diameter while 38 mm diameter is available for BrilLanCe®-380. Larger sizes are expected.