A measurement of the light yield of common inorganic scintillators

The light yield in photons per magaelectronvolt of some common inorganic scintillating crystals has been measured with silicon photodiodes. Incident particles are gammas in the 1-MeV region. The light signal was calibrated against 60-keV gammas converted directly in the photodiode depletion layer. Among the tested materials CsI(Tl) gave the highest light yield of 52000 photons/MeV deposited energy.< >