Lead sulfate scintillator crystal growth for PET applications

It has recently been shown that lead sulfate (PbSO/sub 4/) is a promising scintillator material for use in PET detector systems. However, for lead sulfate scintillators to be useful in such an application, a technique must be developed to grow large optical quality crystals of this material. This paper describes our research into the high-temperature solution growth of PbSO/sub 4/ crystals. We report on the systematic selection of solvent materials including KCl, LiCl, PbCl/sub 2/, Na/sub 2/SO/sub 4/ and Li/sub 2/SO/sub 4/. Our studies indicate that Na/sub 2/SO/sub 4/ is the best solvent. With Na/sub 2/SO/sub 4/ as the flux, we obtained PbSO/sub 4/ single crystals of several millimeters in size by Bridgman crystal growth method. We employed ACRT (accelerated crucible rotation technique), to resolve the constitutional supercooling problem, thus increased the crystal yield and reduced the number of grains. Finally, we compared the scintillation properties of synthetic PbSO/sub 4/ crystals we grew with previous measurements on natural anglesite and other synthetic crystals, and found them nearly identical.< >