Scintillation Counter
A detector in which radiation causes a material to emit flashes of light that are counted and measured.
Unit
counts/s
In depth
The scintillator converts each interaction into a light pulse whose brightness is proportional to the deposited energy, and a photomultiplier amplifies it into a measurable signal. Because the pulse height carries energy information, scintillation counters can identify which isotope is present.
Examples in the real world
Sodium iodide crystals in gamma spectrometry; liquid scintillation counting of tritium and carbon-14 samples.