Speaker
Arno Richard Knapitsch
(CERN)
Description
One of the problems in heavy scintillating materials is related to their high index of refraction. As a consequence, a large part of the scintillation light produced in the bulk material is trapped inside the crystal due to total internal reflection. Recent developments in the area of nanophotonics were showing now that those limitations can be overcome by introducing a photonic crystal slab at the outcoupling surface of the scintillator. In previous work we could show a theoretical light yield improvement of various scintillator materials when applying such a structure at the outcoupling side of the crystal. During the last two years we were working on further improving the structure towards maximal light extraction but also for better timing. In addition we refined our simulation tools to provide better information on the angular and timing distribution of emitted photons from the PhC structure. In the practical part of this work we show the results of the first PhC enhanced scintillator samples. Through the deposition of an auxiliary layer of silicon nitride and the adaptation of the standard electron beam lithography parameters we could successfully produce several PhC slabs on top of 1.2 x 2.x 5mm3 lutetium oxyorthosilicate scintillators. In the characterization process, the PhC samples showed a 30-60% light yield improvement when compared to an unstructured reference scintillator.
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Primary author
Arno Richard Knapitsch
(CERN)
Co-authors
Christian Fabjan
(Austrian Academy of Sciences (AT))
Etiennette Auffray Hillemanns
(CERN)
Paul Lecoq
(CERN)
