Investigation into thallium sites and defects in doped scintillation crystals

Thallium doped caesium iodide, CsI(Tl), and sodium iodide, NaI(Tl) are two of the most efficient scintillators developed and are already widely used for radiation detection and imaging applications. Their use in fast imaging applications however has been hindered by a long lasting high level of afterglow - the percentage of the luminescence pulse remaining a short time after excitation. Very little is known about the point defects in these crystals, such as structure and concentrations, and the first step to understanding the causes of the afterglow is to understand the nature of the defects responsible for the scintillation. In this paper the local structure of the thallium activator ion has been investigated via EXAFS spectroscopy and some basic intrinsic defects calculated using the General Utility Lattice Program (GULP).