WFU Physics Colloquium

TITLE: NON-LINEAR OPTICAL EXPERIMENTS ON SCINTILLATORS

SPEAKER: Dr. K. Burak Üçer ,

TIME: Wednesday Oct. 13, 2010 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 in Olin Physical Laboratory

Scintillators are used to detect high energy radiation and are key components in applications ranging from the Large Hadron Collider to port security to medical imaging. Development of new scintillating materials requires understanding some of the basic limitations plaguing performance such as the energy non-proportionality. For the past few years, our group has been exploring this issue using time resolved photoluminescence and transient absorption. Our research has allowed us and our collaborators to develop a model of carrier behavior in scintillators and link it to non-proportionality. Refinement and verification of this model depends on extending our experimental methods. I will discuss two techniques that make use of non-linear optics, namely optical parametric amplification and degenerate four-wave mixing that will be beneficial in our research.