IEEE S.F. Bay Area Council e-GRID's
BayAreaTech

TUESDAY September 18, 2012
OEB Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Chapter
Speaker: Dr. Stephen Derenzo, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Time: Presentation at 7:30 PM
Cost: none
Place: Lawrence Berkeley Lab Building 55 Room 117, Berkeley
RSVP: Reservation requests to Bill DeHope, dehope1@llnl.gov are required in advance (before noon on 9/17), No Exceptions!
Web: www.mindspring.com/~banchero1/ieee

Inorganic scintillators have been an essential tool of the physical sciences for over 100 years and during that time many new materials have been discovered, developed, and put into widespread use.  Nonetheless there are many applications where the performance of available materials falls far short of what should be possible.  These include gamma-ray stopping power and timing resolution in positron medical imaging, gamma-ray energy resolution for the identification of radioactive materials in national security, and low cost.  This talk will review the current efforts in understanding the fundamental limits of detector materials, the use of empirical and first-principles calculations to guide the selection of new candidates, and the use of high-throughput synthesis and measurement techniques to discover new high-performance scintillators.  The talk will be followed by a tour of the high-throughput synthesis and scintillator characterization labs and the crystal growing facility.  This project maintains the largest open-access database of inorganic scintillation properties at http://scintillator.lbl.gov.