Rare-earth Activated Glass and Glass-Ceramic for Neutron Detection
- PDF / 1,216,578 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 38 Downloads / 225 Views
Rare-earth Activated Glass and Glass-Ceramic for Neutron Detection Wei Dai1,2, Henry Marcacci1,2, Brendan Lynch1, Hisham Menkara1, Brent Wagner1 and Zhitao Kang*1,2, Cai-Lin Wang3, Yacouba Diawara3, Ralf Engels4 1 Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA 30332 2 School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA 30332 3 Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6460 4 Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH, Juelich 52425 Germany ABSTRACT Neutron detection scintillators based on rare-earth activated transparent glass and glass-ceramics are reported. Ce3+ doped gadolinium halides in 6LiF modified aluminosilicate glass matrices were synthesized by a melt-quench method followed by annealing. Their optical properties and alpha, neutron scintillation performance were investigated and compared to conventional 6Li-based scintillating glass. INTRODUCTION Compared to single crystal materials, 6Li-based scintillating glass has been an attractive neutron detection material due to its low-cost, large-volume production capability and easy shaping of elements. The high transparency of a glass scintillator enables a distinctive photopeak in the pulse-height spectrum, which is much easier to discriminate compared to the continuous spectrum of a conventional 6LiF/ZnS:Ag neutron detector. However, glass typically exhibits relatively low light yields, due to the amorphous structure and the presence of many defects which form trapping sites responsible for non-radiative recombination. In this work, an effort on the development of glass ceramic scintillators was conducted. By introducing rare-earth doped nanocrystals into the glass-matrix, luminescence efficiency can be potentially improved while the scintillator’s transparency remains high. With particle size significantly less than the visible wavelength, nanocrystals exhibit little optical scattering attenuation when embedded in a clear glass matrix. Thus, a several-millimeter-thick glass ceramic optimal for neutron detection will still be highly transparent. In recent years, several investigations on the structural and optical properties of GdF3 nanocrystal-containing glass ceramics have been reported. Chen et al. prepared an aluminosilicate glass ceramic with GdF3 nanocrystals embedded in the glass matrix, as observed by TEM and X-ray diffraction. 1 Synthesis and luminescence properties of Tb3+, Eu3+ and Dy3+ doped GdF3 oxyhalide glass ceramics were studied by Shan et. al. 2 Lakshminarayana et al. identified GdF3 and LiGdF4 crystalline phases in a host glass 40SiO2–20Al2O3–20LiF–20GdF3 *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
and reported their luminescence properties. 3 To the best of our knowledge, Ce3+ doped gadolinium halides in glass matrices have never been reported for neutron detection. In this paper, Ce3+ activated GdF3 and GdBr3 based aluminosilicate glass and glass-ceramic scintillators were synthesized by a melt-quench method followed
Data Loading...
