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Phase and Hydrothermal Growth of Bi4Si3O12 Crystals

Xiaoling He ,  Hande Huo ,  Haitao Zhou ,  Mengde Ren ,  Changlong Zhang ,  Yanbin Zuo ,  Jinliang Wang 

China Nonferrous Metal Guilin Geology And Mining Co., Ltd. (CNMC), Guilin 541004, China

Abstract
      Bi4Si3O12 (BSO) is an excellent scintillation crystal having heterogeneous isomorphism with the famous Bi4Ge3O12 (BGO) crystal[1]. BSO has three times as fast fast response time and better radiation hardness than BGO, apart from so better scintillaion properties, the cost of BSO crystal is lower than BGO because the cost of high purity GeO2 is higher than SiO2. In the past twenty years, BSO crystals’ growth was mainly researched by the Bridgman and the Czochralski methods. However, due to the much difference of the density and the melting point of Bi2O3 and SiO2, furthermore, the complicated phase relation of Bi2O3-SiO2, the growth process is difficult to control.

      The hydrothermal method could result in a good optical uniformity and lower thermal stress in grown BSO because of its free growth environment and lower growth temperature, but there is no much effort made to grow BSO by hydrothermal method. To date, only a few reports about powder or aggregating BSO growth were made[2]. In this paper, the growth of BSO single crystal was studied by the hydrothermal method under the condition of sintered 2Bi2O3:3SiO2 as nutrient, NaOH aqueous as mineralizer. In this system, the phase diagram was studied firstly and the results show that there always exist two different phase (Bi4Si3O12 and Bi12SiO20) when the growth temperature between 380℃ and 500℃ and the concentration of NaOH aqueous between 1.5M and 4M. The single BSO phase was obtained through studying the influence of additional SiO2 doped in the mineralizer. BSO crystals with size larger than 8mm were produced. The FWHM of the X-ray rocking curve was 25 arcsec, and the absorption edge was 284nm. From the above results, it is proposed that high quality BSO crystals can be grown by hydrothermal method. Acknowledgement:This work was supported by Guangxi Natural Science Foundation (2012GXNSFAA053215).

* corresponding author e-mail: [email protected]

References:

1. M. Kobayashi, K. Harada, Y. Hirose, M. Ishii, I. Yamaga. Large-size bismuth silicate (Bi4Si3O12) scintillating crystals of good quality, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. A 400, 392 (1997) 2. D. E. Kozhbakhteeva, N. I. Leonyuk. Hydrothermal synthesis and morphology of eulytite-like single crystals, Journal of Optoelectronics and Advanced Materials. 5, 621 (2003)

 

Auxiliary resources (full texts, presentations, posters, etc.)
  1. PRESENTATION: Phase and Hydrothermal Growth of Bi_{4}Si_{3}O_{12} Crystals, Microsoft Office Document, 0MB
 

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Related papers

Presentation: Poster at 17th International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy - ICCGE-17, Topical Session 6, by Xiaoling He
See On-line Journal of 17th International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy - ICCGE-17

Submitted: 2013-03-27 07:13
Revised:   2013-07-23 18:28