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

The properties of heavy metal fluoride glasses have been investigated to as sess the potential for using these materials to construct electromagnetic c alorimeters for particle physics. We report here on measurements of scintil lation yield, transmission and decay time, on large blocks of CeF3-doped Hf F4-based glasses. The effects of sample temperature, the addition of Ce and In, ZrF4 concentrations, and different HfF4 feedstocks, have also been stu died. The samples were excited by a high energy proton beam and the associa ted scintillation yield and time structure was measured. The optical transm ission of the samples was measured. It was observed that by comparing the t ime dependence of scintillation yield with optical transmission, the relati ve contributions of quenching and absorption in reducing optical yield coul d be separated. It was concluded that variations in HfF4 feedstock purity c an be a dominant factor in determining affective scintillation yield of lar ge glass samples. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.