Photonic crystal structures for improved scintillator performance

The ability to extract scintillation light from a crystal with efficiency and speed has great potential to realize the much needed gains in the performance of numerous radiation detection and imaging instruments. Such high performance spectrometers/imaging instruments are vital in medical imaging, industrial, and homeland security applications for the detection, localization, and energy classification of X-rays, γ-rays or neutrons. We report on the development of photonic crystal structures for improving the performance of scintillators. Photonic crystals permit effective utilization of the scintillation light which is otherwise lost when a high refractive index scintillator is coupled to a photodetector with low refractive index window, thereby substantially improving the light extraction efficiency, and energy and timing resolution. We have fabricated these photonic crystal structures using electron-beam lithography technique. Details of the design, fabrication and characterization of the photonic crystals, and their impact on scintillator performance are described here.