Phoswich Detector

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Please improve this article if you can. (April 2008)

"Phoswich detectors were developed to detect low-intensity, low-energy gamma rays, X-rays, as well as alpha and beta particles efficiently in a higher-energy ambient background. Some detector designs can measure and separately identify all energies simultaneously."^[1]

Scintillator manufacturer Saint-Gobain Crystals & Detectors provides a good introduction to this topic. The introduction to this two-page document states, "A phoswich ('phosphor sandwich') is a combination of scintillators with dissimilar pulse shape characteristics optically coupled to each other and to a common PMT (or PMTs). Pulse shape analysis distinguishes the signals from the two scintillators, identifying in which scintillator the event occurred."

The document also describes the operating principles and applications of phoswich detectors and includes two detailed drawings.