Cost effective segmented scintillating converters for hard x-rays
- Radiation Monitoring Devices Inc., Watertown, MA (United States)
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
Thick segmented scintillating converters coupled to optical imaging detectors offer the advantage of large area, high stopping power sensors for high energy X-ray digital imaging. The recent advent of high resolution and solid state optical sensors such as amorphous silicon arrays and CCD optical imaging detectors makes it feasible to build large, cost effective imaging arrays. This technology, however, shifts the sensor cost burden to the segmented scintillators needed for imaging. The required labor intensive fabrication of high resolution, large area hard X-ray converters results in high cost and questionable manufacturability on a large scale. The authors report on recent research of a new segmented X-ray imaging converter. This converter is fabricated using vacuum injection and crystal growth methods to induce defect free, high density scintillating fibers into a collimator matrix. This method has the potential to fabricate large area (>400 cm{sup 2}), thick (10 cm) segmented scintillators. Spatial resolution calculations of these scintillator injected collimators show that the optical light spreading is significantly reduced compared to single crystalline scintillators and sub-millimeter resolution can be achieved for 10 MeV photons. They have produced 2.5 cm thick converters and sub-millimeter resolution X-ray images acquired with the segmented converter coupled to a cooled CCD camera provided the resolution to characterize the converter efficiency and noise. The proposed concept overcomes the above mentioned limitations by producing a cost-effective technique of fabricating large area X-ray scintillator converters with high stopping power and high spatial resolution. This technology will readily benefit diverse fields such as particle physics, astronomy, medicine, as well as industrial nuclear and non-destructive testing.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 524741
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-960848--; ISBN 0-8194-2247-9
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
CdZnTe arrays for nuclear medicine imaging
Scintillating ribbon x-ray detector