We report on the degradation of the scintillation yield of single crystal YAG: Ce under He irradiation at low energy. The decrease of the luminescence intensity as a function of fluence can be analyzed by the Birks model. The results indicate that the scintillator degrades fast and exhibits poor scintillation efficiency for low-energy irradiation.A possible degradation mechanism is proposed.

New experimental results on the scintillation processes for KBr, YAG:Ce, CaF 2 :Eu and CsI:Tl crystals under H 2 + irradiation for the energy range of 600-2150 keV/u are systematically reported. The scintillation light yield was measured as a function of accumulated particle fluence at the rare isotope ReAccelerator (ReA) facility of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). The data indicates that YAG:Ce and CsI:Tl can maintain stable luminescence under continuous ion bombardment for at least a total fluence of 1.8×10 12 ions/mm 2 in the energy range used for this experiment. On the other hand, the luminescence of CaF 2 :Eu shows a rapid initial decay but then maintains a nearly constant luminescence yield. The extraordinary scintillation response of KBr is initially enhanced under ion bombardment, approaches a maximum, and then eventually decays. The scintillation efficiency of the CsI:Tl scintillator is superior to the other materials. The stability of the measured beam profile width deducted from the different scintillator materials in static beam conditions was also investigated as a function of irradiation time. We observed that the low-energy H 2 + bombardment (25 keV/u) on the YAG:Ce scintillator can lead to the significant degradation of the scintillation yields. Different scintillation degradation responses for the low-and high-energy bombardments can be attributed to the transmission loss of the emitted light inside the crystal caused by displacement damages.