Luminescence and scintillation properties of ZnMo1-xWxO4 crystal

Abstract

The luminescence and scintillation properties of ZnMo1-xWxO4 (x = 0, 0.0022, 0.0088) crystals grown by low thermal gradient Czochralski technique were studied in a temperature range of 10–300 K. The good optical transparency above the fundamental absorption of crystals were obtained for all the samples. The luminescence light yield enhancement and slowing of the decay time were observed with lowering the temperature for W doped samples under 4.42 eV excitation. Improvement in scintillation light yield with W doping in ZnMoO4 crystals was observed and found 76% that of ZnWO4 crystal at 10 K for 0.88 mol% W doped ZnMoO4 sample. An additional TSL band was observed for the W doped samples in the temperature range of 70–100 K. The enhancement in scintillation light yield at low temperature with W doping in ZnMoO4 crystal are quite encouraging to use it as a cryogenic phonon scintillation detector for the neutrinoless double beta decay search of 100Mo.