Growth and scintillation properties of Cs2LiLa0.1Y0.9Cl6:Ce crystal

Cs2LiLa0.1Y0.9Cl6:Ce crystals with the dopant concentration from 0.2 to 5 mol% have been successfully grown by the vertical Bridgman method to optimize the scintillation properties for thermal neutron detection. The effects of Ce3+ concentration on the crystal structure, luminescence and scintillation properties were systematically investigated. The PXRD patterns verified the purity of phase and the cubic crystal system with the space group of Fm (3) over barm. The Cs2LiLa0.1Y0.9Cl6 crystals doped with low Ce3+ concentration can achieve more than 60% transmittance. In this paper, we introduce successful efforts to grow crack-free single crystals with the size up to 01 '' x 5 ''. The large-size single crystal obtained a decent energy resolution of 5.3% at 662 keV. The figure of merit (FOM) for this scintillator under Cf-252 reached 1.82, indicating a good discrimination between neutron and gamma.