Ceramic Cs2HfCl6: A Novel Scintillation Material for Use in Gamma Ray Spectroscopy

Single crystal scintillators have become one of the most common materials used in technologies that use radiation detectors. Unfortunately, as technology demands improved detectors, research into better single crystal scintillators has nearly reached its limit. Ceramics provide many benefits over single crystal scintillators and have emerged as a promising new production process. Recent research into ceramic scintillators has mostly dealt with oxides as they are relatively easy to handle and are typically non‐hygroscopic. Among single crystal scintillators, a trend has emerged indicating that the addition of halide ions into the crystal structure improves the light yield and energy resolution of the scintillation material but also tends to make the material hygroscopic and in some cases intrinsically radioactive. Little research is devoted to the investigation of undoped halide ceramic scintillators. Transparent halide Cs2HfCl6 ceramics are developed by hot uniaxial pressing, and the scintillation properties are compared to that of its single crystal counterpart. The energy resolution of the ceramic is found to be 6.4% at 662 keV. The initial results indicate that ceramic scintillators are a viable alternative and a promising new direction in scintillator material technology.