2008 JUN 23 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to recent research from the United States, "Cesium cerium bromide (CS2CeBr5) and potassium cerium bromide (K2CeBr5) are new scintillator materials for X-ray and gamma ray detector applications. Recently, halide scintillator materials such as Ce-doped lanthanum bromide have been proved to be very important materials for the same purpose."

  "These materials are highly hygroscopic; a search for high-light-yield non-hygroscopic materials was highly desirable to advance the scintillator technology. In this paper, we are reporting the crystal growth of novel scintillator materials, CS2CeBr5 and K2CeBr5. Crystals were successfully grown from the melt using the vertical Bridgman-Stockbarger technique. In comparison with the high-performance LaBr3 or LaCl3 crystals, cerium-based alkali halide crystals, CS2CeBr5 and K2CeBr5, have similar scintillation properties, while being much less hygroscopic. Furthermore, cesium-based compounds will not suffer from the self-activity present in potassium and lanthanum compounds. However, the CS2CeBr5 crystals did not grow properly probably due to non-congruent melting or some phase transition during cooling," wrote R. Hawramia and colleagues, Alabama A&M University ...read more

  2008 MAR 31 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to a study from the United States, "Large-scale controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) three-dimensional (3D) geophysical imaging is now receiving considerable attention for electrical-conductivity mapping of potential offshore oil and gas reservoirs. To cope with the typically large computational requirements of the 3D CSEM imaging problem, our strategies exploit computational parallelism and optimized finite-difference meshing. ...read more

  2008 MAR 31 - (VerticalNews.com) -- "N-body simulations present some of the most interesting challenges in the area of massively parallel computing, especially when the object is to improve the time to solution for a fixed-size problem. The Blue Matter molecular simulation framework was developed specifically to address these challenges, to explore programming models for massively parallel machine architectures in a concrete context, and to support the scientific goals of the IBM Blue Gene((R)) Project," scientists writing in the IBM Journal of Research and Development report ...read more