Influence of boron on the essential properties for new generation scintillators

Abstract Cerium doped yttrium aluminum (YAG:Ce) and lutetium aluminum garnets (LuAG:Ce) are some of the most popular materials used as scintillators. While the scintillators themselves are materials that absorb and convert high-energy radiation into light. The decay time in YAG:Ce and LuAG:Ce is about 60 ns, therefore the essential task for their improvement would be to shorten it as much as possible. For this reason, in this work, the aforementioned garnets were doped with different amounts of boron. B3+ ion has a suitable neutron capture cross section and can therefore absorb gamma radiation. Because of the extremely strong absorption of thermal neutrons and the weak interaction with MeV gamma rays the material is an exciting new inorganic scintillator candidate for the detection thermal and epithermal neutrons. B3+ stimulates and improves the absorption of such radiation. In the study, 0.05% of cerium and different amounts of boron doped YAG, YLuAG (Y1.5Lu1.5Al5O12) and LuAG were synthesized by the sol-gel method. To investigate the influence of the annealing atmosphere, all samples in powder form were heated either under air or reducing atmospheres. XRD, SEM characterization techniques were performed on the synthesized samples. Luminescent properties were measured and analyzed. The main results that have been observed from this research were that boron does indeed shorten decay time, while also increasing emission intensity. The most intensive emission was of those powder compounds containing 1% and 5% of boron, regardless of the annealing atmosphere. While pure samples doped with 5% of boron have the shortest decay times.