Vacuum ultraviolet silicon photomultipliers applied to BaFcross-luminescence detection for high-rate ultrafast timing applications.

Inorganic scintillators are widely used for fast timing applications in high-energy physics (HEP) experiments, time-of-flight positron emission tomography and time tagging of soft and hard x-ray photons at advanced light sources. As the best coincidence time resolution (CTR) achievable is proportional to the square root of the scintillation decay time it is worth studying fast cross-luminescence, for example in BaFwhich has an intrinsic yield of about 1400 photons/MeV. However, emission bands in BaFare located in the deep-UV at 195 nm and 220 nm, which sets severe constraints on photodetector selection.