Other activities

I have initiated a collaboration with the Department of Chemistry in Lund to establish an activity in crystal growth since there so far was no activities in this field in Sweden. The aim was to gain experience in controlled growth of large optical crystals. For this purpose a crystal puller according to the Czochralski method was designed and built at the mechanical workshop of the Institute. Later this has been complemented with another improved puller constructed by us, and also with a commercial apparatus. This project has received strong support from various finance agencies and has attracted great interest from other fields such as chemistry, solid state physics and laser technology as well as from industry. The ambitions of the project as a whole have therefore increased with the aim of creating a Swedish centre for crystal growth. The equipment anf the activities have now moved to Gothenburg.

For calorimetry in particle physics monocrystal so far have offered the best possible energy resolution. They have also the nice properties of being compact and homogenous.

In 1993 I initiated a collaboration between the Dept. of Atomic Spectroscopy in Lund and a group at HASYLAB at DESY in Hamburg with the purpose of determine the so far unknown luminescence mechanism responsible for the fast UV light from undoped CsI by using a synchrotron light source. Measurements on other types of crystals potentially interesting for high counting rate environments are being performed both at Max-lab in Lund and HASYLAB at DESY. Results on undoped CsI crystal and Tungstates have been presented and very well received at various conferences and the first publications have now appeared. The apparatus is being improved with a new VUV spectrometer equipped with a CCD camera.

With this equipment we are in the unique situation to be able to perform measurements on crystals which have been grown under various conditions controlled by our apparatus. Thereby more systematic investigations of the performance of the crystals on the growth conditions can be done.