Investigation into the effects of indium, and the purity of precursor materials on the scintillation yield of cerium-doped heavy metal fluoride glasses for electromagnetic calorimetry in particle physics

摘要

The properties of heavy metal fluoride glasses have been investigated to assess the potential for using these materials to construct electromagnetic calorimeters for particle physics. We report here on measurements of scintillation yield, transmission and decay time, on large blocks of CeF_3-doped HfF_4-based glasses. The effects of sample temperature, the addition of Ce and In, ZrF_4 concentrations, and different HfF_4 feedstocks, have also been studied. The samples were excited by a high energy proton beam and the associated scintillation yield and time structure was measured. The optical transmission of the samples was measured. It was observed that by comparing the time dependence of scintillation yield with optical transmission, the relative contributions of quenching and absorption in reducing optical yield could be separated. It was concluded that variations in HfF_4 feedstock purity can be a dominant factor in determining affective scintillation yield of large glass samples.