3. Scintillation detectors

3.1 Introduction

Scintillators fall into two main families:

• inorganic scintillators, which are crystalline ;

• organic scintillators, which include plastics and some crystals and whose fluorescence processes are based on different physical principles (see § 4.2). Table 4 gives the main characteristics of the scintillators commonly used (for definitions, see § 4.3).

The values given apply at room temperature. The light yield of a scintillator decreases significantly as the temperature rises: for...