Measuring the refractive index of scintillation crystal with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Abstract

The refractive index of the scintillation crystal is a key parameter in the design of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) devices. However, existing methods to measure the refractive index always suffer from problems such as the complexity of optical path adjustment, long time cost, or high equipment consumption. To overcome these problems, we propose a method that can obtain the refractive index of the scintillation crystal with high accuracy in real time. In this method, we employ the Mach-Zehnder interferometer to generate the interference pattern when one beam of light passes through the scintillation crystal, which encodes the value of refractive index into the width of pattern. To obtain the width of interference pattern, we calculate the width pixels of dark/bright stripes in pattern with threshold, respectively, and finally get the average number of pixels of the pattern; this strategy can eliminate the coherent interference signal and random noise effectively. The optical path need not adjust during the whole measurement. Thus, the refractive index of scintillation crystals can be measured with reliability and efficiency. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we measure different batches of BGO crystal and Ce:LYSO crystal samples. The results show that the proposed method can measure refractive indices with high accuracy and high efficiency, providing a reliable crystal refractive index measurement procedure for the PET detector module design. The proposed method is also suitable for refractive index measurements of transparent materials in visible light bands.