Annealing is one of the important heat treatment technologies

which means that heating something such as crystal

metal

alloy and so on to the critical temperature and cooling slowly after holding the temperature for a given time. Annealing is very important during the course of the crystal growth technology. Through the different annealing treatment we can obtain some important information about the crystal defects. The annealing processes are varied

there is no annealing furnace that can settle for the different need of vacuum annealing and atmosphere annealing.A minitype temperature-controlled annealing furnace with high precision is introduced

which is designed by the Phol Institute of Solid State Physics of Tongji University in Shanghai. This paper describes the furnace in three aspects

which are the configuration of the annealing stove

the design of the fittings at the ends of quartz tube and the operation of the programmable temperature-controller. In allusion to the representative annealing process of the crystal (PbWO

4

)

the selection of the PID parameters and the debugging of the temperature-control program are defined particularly.We use this furnace accomplish the annealing treatments of lead tungstate crystal (PbWO

4

) at different atmosphere (oxygen and argon atmosphere). The optical absorption or transmission spectroscopy provides enough information about the related defects caused by the different annealing atmosphere. The experimental results of the X-ray excited luminescence spectra also demonstrate that annealing at different atmosphere will bring the different influence for lead tungstate samples.We can find that the luminescence and radiation hardness characteristics of PbWO

4

can be obviously modified by oxygen annealing. As we all know that in PbWO

4

crystal Pb-vacancy (V

Pb

) and O-vacancy (V

O

) are the main defects because PbO is easy to volatilize. So we can conclude the luminescence and radiation hardness are connected with V

O

.