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.