Scintillation glass combines the low-cost advantages of plastic scintillator and the high-density advantages of scintillation crystals. As early as the 1990s, CERN proposed using scintillation glass for electromagnetic calorimeters in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. With the discovery of the Higgs particle at CERN in 2012, the final piece of the puzzle in the Standard Model of particle physics has been found. In order to achieve in-depth research on the properties of the Higgs particle and boson and establish new particle physics models, Chinese scientists proposed to build a 100 km circumference Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) in China. The demand for scintillation materials as high-energy ray energy conversion media is as high as tens of tons. The development of low-cost, large-size fast scintillation glass is the key to construction, and it is also an international consensus.

　　The research team was invited by the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in June 2023 to join the new large-area scintillation glass development cooperation group. By regulating the glass composition and reduction preparation process, the research team prepared large-size (4 cm × 4 cm × 1 cm) cerium-doped high gadolinium oxyfluoride glass (SBAGF) with a glass density of 5.83 g/cm3. Under γ-ray irradiation (generated by 137Cs), the light yield reaches 1198 ph/MeV, the energy resolution is 33.0%, and the scintillation decay time combines fast and slow components, which are 112 ns (3.31%) and 1366 ns (96.69%) respectively. This study shows that cerium-doped high gadolinium oxyfluoride glass may become the glass scintillator material for CEPC high-energy ray detection.

　　Fig. 1 (a) The photograph of SBAGF glass, (b) The energy spectra of SBAGF glass and BGO crystal under 137Cs ( 662 keV ) radiation source, (c)The scintillation decay curve of SBAGF glass.

　　Article website: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272884224010459