BGO fibers growth by μ-pulling down technique and study of light propagation

• Published in: Physics procedia Vol. 2; no. 3; pp. 819 - 825
• Main Authors: Farhi, H., Belkahla, S., Lebbou, K., Dujardin, C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.11.2009
• Subjects: [formula omitted] pulling down technique; BGO; Fiber; Growth; Single crystals; μ pulling down technique; Single crystals; BGO; Growth; Fiber
• ISSN: 1875-3892; 1875-3892
• DOI: 10.1016/j.phpro.2009.11.030

There is a great progress in inorganic scintillators study, new crystals composition have been investigated, novel scintillation mechanism have been discovered, and additional application have been appeared especially imaging for medical application. There are a different academic and industrial program for the improvement of the scintillators crystals and applications. Since fifteen years ago, fibers geometry is an attractive topic for a large wide of application such lasers and scintillation. In spite of the big scientific and industrials efforts for fibers valorisation, still now there aren’t a concrete applications based on fibers design. This problem can be related to the application limit based on fibers design, single crystal fibers packaging, and the limit of fibers single crystal growth technology compared to the bulk crystals elaboration. Our teems are involved in different national and international fibers program. We are working on Bi4Ge3O12 (BGO) single crystal fibers using micro-pulling down technology. The BGO crystals melt congruently at 1060∘C and have many excellent characteristics such as large density, short radiation length, light output as large as 10% of NaI:Tl, non hygroscopic, absence of cleavage, mechanical rigidness, high resistivity to radiation damages and price is rather low compared to LSO crystals. In this work, we present long BGO single crystalline fibers (Figure 1) grown by μ-PD. The obtained fibers have good qualities, the optical properties will be discussed and we will evaluate their scintillation characteristics.