Hot-pressed 6LiInSe2 for use as a ceramic radiation detector

Abstract

Lithium based chalcogenides have many uses in the nuclear science field. 6LiInSe2 (or LISe) has been researched extensively because of its ability to operate in both scintillator and semiconductor modes. This makes it useful in applications including nuclear material detection for national security, space applications, and medical imaging. In some applications growth and fabrication costs are of concern, as it takes upwards of 40 days to synthesize a charge, grow a crystal and fabricate a detector. Ceramics are a solution for this long route of preparation. This research shows that using a 6LiInSe2 ceramic instead of a single crystal significantly decreases the time required to make a detector. In the present work, ceramic wafers can be formed using a mechanical press equipped with a heating attachment. The resulting ceramic wafer performs very similar to a slow-growth single crystal when used in the scintillator mode.