Innovation is very important to Hilger in terms of crystal growth and processing. It’s been the fabric of the company for over 80 years with the design and manufacturing of some of the early crystals in the s. We won the “Queens Award for Technological Innovation” for Zinc Tungstate (ZnWO4) used in CT scanning. In fact, we were the early pioneers of this technology that has gone on to save millions of lives throughout the world.
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We recently developed and now offer a new generation of reflectors for crystal arrays that are more radiation hard and guaranteed to last longer. This has helped extend the life of our customer’s products by at least 2 years reducing their maintenance costs and overall cost of ownership.
We supply scintillation arrays as linear or two-dimensional arrays ranging from 4 pixels all the way up to 1,000 pixels and we ensure that every one of those pixels meets the customer’s requirements. Arrays typically range from 5mm to 200mm in size and individual pixels can be as small as 0.5mm depending on the crystal material and thickness.
Hilger has the ability to grow synthetic crystals in large volumes and to incredibly demanding specifications in close collaboration with our customers — a practice that has proven successful from prototyping new research to wide-reaching commercial engagements for over 80 years!
Our employees are highly skilled and extremely well trained in hand crafting crystals. We also offer crystal polishing, processing, and state-of-the-art metrology – all under one roof. We’re a sweet spot between size and expertise where we have a huge range of knowledge and work together to produce a solution that best fits your needs.
Our standard warranty is two years for workmanship issues and we pass on the one year warranty from the photomultiplier tube vendor. The expected lifetime is approximately 5-10 years. This time frame is based upon limited data from non-warranty returns provided to Saint-Gobain for scrap or refurbishment. Many of the detectors have been in the field for more than ten years without any issues. NaI(Tl) crystals and photomultiplier tubes are thermally and mechanically shock sensitive. Overexposure to either can cause premature failures. Care should be taken when handling the detectors. Photomultiplier tubes should function for many thousands of hours, and particularly long life is commonplace in scintillation counting experiments where incident light levels and output current demands are fairly low. Factors shortening the life of the tube include high current operation, excessive voltage operation, high light levels and increased temperature. If the detector is exposed to high levels of gamma radiation, the lifetime of the photomultiplier can be reduced.
It is important to mention that we have 2 categories of designs for these high resolving materials: Premium designs and Compact designs.
The premium designs are full oriented for the best spectroscopy performances (the best energy resolution) and usually use a larger PMT compared to the cross section of the crystal.
The Compact designs use a smaller PMT and provide the best compromise between energy resolution and outer mechanical dimensions.
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If we compared equivalent Premium designs for these different materials (with standard dimensions from 1.5”x1.5” to 3”x3” for example), a product with a Lanthanum Bromide scintillation crystal will provide a guaranteed PHR @ 662keV <3.0% (with average values around 2.7%); when an Enhanced Lanthanum Bromide scintillation crystal will provide a guaranteed PHR @ 662keV <2.5% (with typical values at 2.2-2.3%).
For equivalent design, the CLLB scintillation product will have a guaranteed PHR @ 662keV <4,5%. To illustrate this last value, we can refer to a production of more than 100 units with 2” diameter X 4” long CLLB scintillation crystal: all products have been delivered with a PHR @ 662keV <4.5% and the average value for these units was at 4.03%.
Currently, there is the same 227Ac background for both Lanthanum Bromide [LaBr3(Ce)], and Enhanced Lanthanum Bromide [LaBr3(Ce+Sr)]. This background has a maximum level around 0.2 – 0.15 Bq/cc for these alpha emitters (227Ac).
But, it’s important to note that the position of this background is not at the same location in the spectrum for Enhanced Lanthanum Bromide compared to standard Lanthanum Bromide: For Lanthanum Bromide, the 227Ac background is between 1.6MeV et 2.7MeV, and the same background is between 2.5MeV to 3.8MeV for Enhanced Lanthanum Bromide: Depending on the application, the background may be outside the interest range.
We have been manufacturing Lanthanum Bromide products since . Today, our largest standard dimension is 3” diameter x 3” thick, but upon specific request we can supply a larger diameter (up to 5”) and a longer length (up to 8”).
For Enhanced Lanthanum Bromide material, we use our knowledge and competencies that have been developed with our standard Lanthanum Bromide. Then, today we are able to provide scintillation products with large Enhanced Lanthanum Bromide crystals: 3” diameter x 3” thick standard dimensions and we can provide, upon request, scintillation product with crystal up to 3” diameter x 4” thick.
The light output of organic scintillators is traditionally given as a percentage of the light output of Anthracene. Anthracene is an organic crystal that is not commercially available. On this scale, the light output of NaI(Tl) is about 210%. A better number for PVT based plastic scintillators is 104 scintillation photons per MeV deposited into the scintillator. That number is good for Minimum Ionizing Particles (MIPs) such as fast electron and cosmic ray muons. Heavier and/or more ionizing particles such as protons and alpha particles produce few photons per unit energy deposited. The relative light yield by particle type is shown in a chart in the
The referenced media source is missing and needs to be re-embedded.. The energy deposition rate for MIPs in plastic scintillators is 2 MeV/cm.
Contact us to discuss your requirements of Scintillation Crystal. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.