6. Scintillation mechanisms

The scintillating process enables energy conversion from a ionizing particle interacting with matter into light energy. A particle having several keV or even MeV of energy is thus absorbed, slowed down or scattered leading to the emission of several, tens, hundreds or thousands of photons of a few eV. The physical processes involved are rather complex; this section aims to present an overview of the main energy relaxation steps. For the electron and hole, descriptions are inspired by solid state physics, meaning energy band diagrams as well as localized energy levels. We have seen in paragraph 5