Speaker
Description
Changing from Academic to Entrepreneurship is certainly a glamorous dream for everyone. But this is a very hard road in reality. Research in crystal growth and application has a lot of fun and we all enjoyed to do it. There seems to have endless number of materials that can be studied in research. However, when to put it in real industrial application, the usable material list drops significantly with only a few survivors.
Scintillator crystal industry is no difference. It is totally technology driven. There are hundreds of known scintillating crystals. But only a few of them are useful. Nevertheless, the actual demand of crystal quantity is much higher than people would have expected. The reason is simple. We need finite volume of crystals in order to capture high energy rays and particles. We are very fortunate that single crystals still provide the best scintillating properties over ceramics,plastics and other composites. This is the only reason why scintillator crystal industry still can exist.
Current known scintillator crystals can serve the demand adequately. But there is always the need of research for better materials. So academic research and industrial production are in a beautiful balance between them.
