Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington have developed a new method for creating transparent nanoscintillators for the detection of radiation. They heated lanthanum, yttrium and oxygen nanoparticles together until they formed a transparent ceramic. This material demonstrated better energy resolution.
Dr. Wei Chen, of the University of Texas at Arlington, is lead author on a new Optics Letters paper that describes the development of a new radiation detection method. Credit: UT Arlington
The principal investigator of the study is Wei Chen, a Physics Professor and head of Security Advances Via Applied Nanotechnology (SAVANT) Center at UT Arlington. He received a $1.3 million grant to develop a new radiation detector for detecting nuclear materials that could potentially be used for terrorist activities in the U.S.
The co-principal investigator of the study, physics professor Andrew Brandt, is the SAVANT Center’s co-director. He shared his expertise in scintillator and detector technology, while Chen contributed his knowledge about behavior of nanoparticles.
Scintillator materials glow when they detect radiation. Currently, caesium iodide and sodium iodide materials are used as scintillators. The newly developed scintillator material is comparatively more stable and has a rapid luminescence decay time. This property is necessary for detection of radiation.
Currently, nanoparticles are embedded onto glass or clear polymers for making scintillators. This makes the material lose its transparency due to aggregation. In order to avoid aggregation and also retain transparency, the UT Arlington researchers used wet chemistry to synthesize nanoparticles. These particles were then heated to a temperature that was lower than their melting point.
Many people use this compound as a host material for lasers or other optical operations, but no one had ever tried this for radiation detection as far as we know. We used a new way to make these materials and found that they hold a lot of promise as a new direction for luminescent scintillator research.
UT Arlington Physics Professor Wei Chen
Various samples were tested and La0.2Y1.8 O3 was found to be the best among them. This material is cost-effective as it comprises less expensive rare earth elements. Further, this material demonstrated comparatively better resolution than caesium iodide or sodium iodide.
This study has been reported in a paper titled "Luminescence of La0.2Y1.8 O3 nanostructured scintillators” and has been published in Optics Letters.