Light yield measurements of milled BaFCl:Eu inorganic crystals

In recent years, composite scintillators consisting of nanosize inorganic crystals in an organic matrix have been actively developed. Ideally these scintillators would have efficiency and resolution similar to inorganic crystals, but at the same time would be inexpensive and easy to manufacture. In order to make composite scintillators optically transparent, McKigney et al. finds that nanosize inorganic crystals should be used in order to reduce optical scattering. One way to produce these nanosize inorganic crystals is through wet milling, where inorganic crystals are ground with microsize beads in an organic solvent to achieve size reduction. Milling is relatively simple in terms of preparation and equipment; however, milling is also known to introduce defects into the ground material. Therefore, a new light yield measurement technique is developed to evaluate the degree to which milling alters the light yield of the milled inorganic crystals. In this work, the light yield measurement technique is applied to samples containing BaFCl:Eu inorganic crystals milled in a tributyl phosphate (TBP) and cyclohexane mixture.