Effect of Ba2+ doping on the properties of CeBr3 single crystal

•Growth of transparent and crack free single crystals of Ba doped CeBr3 of size 10 mm diameter and 15 mm length.•Ba2+ doping does not affects the structural and optical properties of CeBr3.•Ba2+ doping decreases the hygroscopic nature of CeBr3.•Scintillation performance of CeBr3 improved with Ba2+ doping. In this work we have grown CeBr3:Ba single crystal of diameter 10 mm and length 15 mm and compared its crystal structure, luminescence and scintillation properties with pure CeBr3 crystal. It is observed that Ba2+ doping don’t change the structural properties of CeBr3 and these crystals have same hexagonal UCl3 type structure. Further, the transmission and radio luminescence spectra of Ba2+ doped and undoped CeBr3 is almost similar. The hygroscopic nature of CeBr3 is found to be remarkably reduced after Ba2+ doping. Ba2+ doping is also found to improve the scintillation performance of CeBr3 crystal by decreasing the energy resolution though there is a slight increase in the decay time of CeBr3. The energy resolution for 0.1 mol% Ba2+ doped CeBr3 is 4.46% as compared to 4.7% for pure CeBr3 crystal.