New inorganic scintillation materials development for medical imaging

In this paper the results of one year of effort to develop the production technology of LuAP crystals will be presented. As already advertised since several years Lu based compounds doped with trivalent Ce which show fast and bright scintillation seem to be the most promising scintillators for a new generation of PET scanners. Two crystals. namely LSO:Ce and LuAP:Ce are already in the phase of mass production technology development but there is still an interest to search for materials with better combination of price/performance. As already mentioned in our contribution to the IEEE2000 conference in Lyon, the Crystal Clear Collaboration strategy is to look for a host where Lutetium is associated to another heavy cation to reduce the cost of the material. In our present study we paid attention to the compounds containing rare earth and Ba, Zr, Hf, which being doped with Ce show a very bright and fast luminescence in the blue-green region. Materials have been synthetized with a the same time an increase of the effective charge of the host matrix and a decrease or even a complete suppression of the Lu fraction. In our report we discuss spectroscopic and scintillation properties of several new heavy compounds such as Lu₂ Hf₂O₇, La₂Hf₂O₇ and Ba₃Lu₄O₉ doped with Ce and the possibilities of their industrial production