Scintillator and dosimeter properties of Ce3+ doped CaF2AlF3AlPO4 glasses
Introduction
Fluorescent materials are used for ionizing radiation detectors, and these materials can be divided by two groups: scintillators and storage phosphors (or as known as dosimeters). Scintillators have a function to convert the absorbed energy of ionizing radiation into low energy photons immediately [1,2]. Thus, they have been widely used in practical applications including medical imaging [3], security [4], and high energy physics [5]. On the other hand, since dosimeter materials have a function to store and accumulate the absorbed energy of ionizing radiation, they have been mainly used to measure absorbed energy in the human body [6], namely, individual radiation monitoring. Ideally, the effective atomic number (Zeff) of dosimeter materials should be close to that of the soft tissue of human body (Zeff = 7.29). If the Zeff of dosimeter material is perfectly the same, no corrections of energy dependence are needed to estimate the radiation dose.
For dosimeter materials, inorganic bulk forms such as single crystals, ceramics and glasses have been used. Among these inorganic materials, glasses have some advantages for radiation detectors because their shape and size are easily controlled. Common glass dosimeters are oxide materials because oxide materials are chemically stable under ambient atmosphere, although their high phonon energies cause multi-phonon relaxations resulting in less efficient luminescence. In contrast, fluoride materials have notable advantages such as high transparency, high solubility of rare-earth ions, low melting temperature and low phonon energy [[7], [8], [9], [10], [11]]. However, fluoride glasses are sometimes chemically unstable and low in mechanical strength. To combine the advantages of oxide and fluoride glasses, fluorophosphate glasses were proposed. Recently, fluorophosphate glass containing fluoride materials such as ZnF2 and CaF2 were developed [[13], [14], [15], [16], [17]]. However, up to now, investigations of fluorophosphate glasses for radiation detectors have not been conducted enough, and there is a large room for study.
In this study, we synthesized Ce3+ doped CaF2AlF3AlPO4 glasses with different concentrations of Ce3+. The Zeff of these materials are about 14.7, and the value is close to that of human body tissue. Then, we evaluated their photoluminescence (PL), scintillation and thermally stimulated luminescence (TSL) properties.
Section snippets
Experiment
The xCeF3-(55-x)CaF235AlF310AlPO4 (x = 0, 0.02, 0.2, 1.0, 10) glasses were prepared at Advanced Industrial Science and Technology by the melt-quenching method. The Ce3+ concentrations were 0.02, 0.2, 0.1, 10%. In addition, non-doped CaF2AlF3AlPO4 glass was prepared for comparison. Reagent grade CeF3, CaF2, AlF3, and AlPO4 powders were mixed and melted in a carbon crucible at 900 °C for 20 min in N2 atmosphere. The melts were casted on carbon plate and press-quenched with an iron plate. The
Result and discussion
Photographs of prepared glass samples are shown in Fig. 1. After polishing, the obtained glass samples look transparent and colorless under room light. Exposed to UV right (254 nm), all the Ce3+ doped samples exhibited strong absorption of UV light which created shadow on the paper unlike the non-doped sample. In addition, any PL was not visually confirmed. Table 1 shows the thickness of CaF2AlF3AlPO4 glass samples. Thickness difference of the thinnest sample and the thickest sample is 0.26 mm
Conclusion
We investigated PL, scintillation and TSL properties of Ce3+ doped CaF2AlF3AlPO4 glasses. In the PL map, all the Ce3+ doped samples showed a strong broad emission band across 280–380 nm due to the 5d-4f transitions of Ce3+. The QY and PL decay times of Ce3+ doped samples were 15.8–62.8% and 28–35.2 ns, respectively. In the scintillation spectra, although all the samples showed emission peak around 330 nm, it is considered that the non-doped and Ce3+ doped samples have different luminescent
Author agreement
1. This manuscript has not been published, was not, and is not being submitted to any other journal. If presented at a conference, the conference is identified. If published in conference proceedings, substantial justification for re-publication must be presented.
2. All necessary permissions for publication were secured prior to submission of the manuscript.
3. All authors listed have made a significant contribution to the research reported and have read and approved the submitted manuscript,
Declaration of interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (17H01375), (B) (18H03468) and for Early-Career Scientists (18K14158) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of the Japanese government (MEXT) The Cooperative Research Project of Research Institute of Electronics, Shizuoka University, Iketani Science and Technology Foundation, and NSG Foundation are also acknowledged.
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