Enhanced light output of scintillators by ZnO nanorod arrays

Scintillators are widely used in national security, industrial and medical fields. The light extraction efficiency of scintillator is quite low due to the total internal reflection. Therefore, enhancement the light output of scintillator is highly important. In this paper, we use ZnO nanorod (NR) arrays fabricated by a simple hydrothermal growth route to enhance the light extraction efficiency of Bi4Ge3O12 (BGO) crystal scintillator. The light output results demonstrate that the light extraction efficiency of BGO with ZnO NRs is significantly enhanced, with an enhancement ratio of 4.1 and 3.5 at 510 nm wavelength under 266 nm laser and X-ray excitation, respectively. Our numerically calculated light transmissivity spectra and electric field intensity distributions of BGO with and without ZnO NRs by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation reveal that the ZnO NRs could reduce the total internal reflection and allow more light to be extracted, resulted in the enhancement of light output of BGO.

Automated summary

In this paper, ZnO nanorod arrays are used to enhance the light extraction efficiency of BGO crystal scintillator. The results show that the light output is significantly enhanced, demonstrating the effectiveness of this method.