Construct · 3 fields · 4 citations
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In astronomy, scintillation is the rapid fluctuation in the apparent brightness and position of a star (the familiar twinkling), caused not by the star itself but by light passing through turbulent layers of the Earth's atmosphere whose varying refractive index bends and focuses the beam from moment to moment. Megaw's 1950 Scattering of electromagnetic waves by atmospheric turbulence: Stellar scintillation and the spectrum of turbulence in the free atmosphere tied the effect to the statistics of refractive-index fluctuations aloft, and Hewish, Scott, and Wills's 1964 Interplanetary scintillation of small diameter radio sources extended the same idea to radio sources whose signals flicker as they cross the turbulent solar wind. The referent is an intensity fluctuation imposed on an incoming wave by a disturbing medium, measured by a scintillation index, and it shares only the word, not the mechanism, with a sparkling gem or a flashing radiation detector.[1][2]
In gemology, scintillation is one of the three components of a cut stone's optical appearance alongside brilliance and fire: it is the pattern of small, lively flashes of light (sparkle) that a faceted gem throws off as the stone, the light source, or the observer moves, each facet briefly catching and releasing a reflection. Webster's Gems: Their sources, descriptions and identification treats scintillation as a quality of cut, governed by the number, size, and arrangement of facets and by how the stone is polished, so that a well-proportioned diamond delivers many crisp flashes rather than a dull glow. The referent is the dynamic sparkle of a worked gemstone judged by eye, a property of how the stone is cut rather than of any disturbing medium or emitted radiation.[3]
In radiation physics, scintillation is the prompt emission of a flash of light by certain materials when ionizing radiation deposits energy in them: the particle excites the scintillator, which relaxes by emitting photons, and a photomultiplier or photodiode converts each flash into an electrical pulse whose size tracks the energy deposited. Knoll's Radiation detection and measurement sets out the scintillation mechanism in inorganic crystals and organic media and the detectors built on it, where counting and sizing the flashes measures the intensity and energy of a radiation field. The referent is a light pulse produced inside a detector by an absorbed particle, a quantitative measurement signal rather than a star's twinkle or a gemstone's sparkle.[4]
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