Preparation And Luminescence Properties Of Rare Earth (Pr,Ce) Doped Phosphate Scintillation Glasses

Scintillating glasses can be used for the detection of X-rays, y-rays and neutrons. They are attractive scintillating material due to their advantages including low production cost, easy shaping of elements, possibility to incorporate activator ions at high concentrations and in the ease of manufacture in different sizes and shapes with respect to single crystal materials. Many studies have been devoted to researching on borosilicate scintillating glasses, but the larger problem of these glass are low light yield and radiation-induced photo darkening problems. However, phosphate glasses are as regarded as suitable host for scintillator mainly because the structure of phosphate glass has a strong dispersing ability to rare-earth ions, high luminescence efficiency of rare earth ions, low darkening effect, then, there is low melting temperature.In this paper, a series of Ce³⁺ and Pr³⁺ doped phosphate scintillation glasses have been prepared by high temperature melting method. Through differential thermal analysis, absorption spectroscopy, excitation and emission spectroscopy, emission spectra under X-ray excitation, luminescence decay and Raman spectra et.al, the influence of different composition concentration and sensitizer Gd₂O₃ in the phosphate scintillation glasses. The results show that the energy transfer from Gd+ to Ce+ plays an important role in the scintillation mechanism of these glasses and the optimum concentration of Gd₂O₃ is found to be approximately 3 mol%. The highest light emission intensity of these glass samples excited by X-ray is 25% of BGO. Meanwhile, replacing lighter compound BaO with the BaF2 can increase the density of the glasses and also improve the light yield. The photoluminescence and scintillation properties of the glass have been grently improved, when cerium doped fluorophosphate glasses are higher than the glass transition temperature of the heat treatment. The maximum efficiency of the scintillator is 35% of BGO. At the same time, we also found heavy metals oxides,such as PbO?Bi₂O₃?BaO et.al, has a strong effect of annihilation to Pr³⁺ ion luminescence.