Present Status of Scintillation Counter Development in France

Some properties of different types of photomultipliers which are now in commercial use in France, such as background linearity at high currents, transit time fluctuations, and stability for a counting, are discussed. In addition, some properties of different types of scintillators in commercial use or under development are presented. These include amplitude, light spectrum and decay time temperature for various mineral or organic (solid and liquid) scintillators, and of several gaseous mixtures. The latter part of this paper describes briefly two new French applications of scintillation techniques: gamma spectrometer for aerial prospecting and the use of scintillation counters for measuring thermal neutron fluxes in reactors.