The development of scintillating materials has had a significant impact on various fields
including medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, security applications, high energy physics, rare event search etc. Today, scintillating materials include a wide range of organic and inorganic substances, such as plastic scintillators, liquid scintillators, organic glass scintillators, thin films, nano-composites, aerogels, MOFs, low dimensional perovskites, photonic crystals and more advanced inorganic crystals etc. However, the discovery of alternative materials and the improvement of existing scintillators’ performances require a systematic and integrated multi-disciplinary approach. It can be achieved only when the researchers, experts in diverse fields, work altogether along with the end-users of the devices. In this talk, along with the current trend of selecting an appropriate scintillating material for a particular application, a systematic approach for adequately addressing various issues in the development of advanced scintillators will be presented with the example of a versatile single crystal scintillator of Ce doped GGAG. A novel phoswich detector consisting of two promising single crystal scintillators to discriminate various kinds of radiation with a promising figure-of-merit (FOM) along with advantages over other single crystal scintillators reported so far will be also presented in details. The high pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) for different radiations has been achieved by a novel combination of a Boron co-doped Gd3Ga3Al2O12:Ce (GGAG) crystal coupled to a CsI:Tl (CsI) single crystal in a phoswich detector design. The opposite trend of decay time dependence on alpha and gamma radiations results in the large difference in their decay times, which significantly improves the discrimination ability of the phoswich. The most versatile performance of this phoswich detector in discrimination of gamma-gamma, alpha-gamma, and neutron-gamma will be presented with application of indigenously developed detector in various applications.
