Characterization of radiation interaction properties of borate glasses doped with silver nanoparticles

J. ELIAS; M. VALLEJOS; I. SCARINCI; M. VALENTE

Simposio; ISSD 2022 - XXI INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON SOLID STATE DOSIMETRY; 2021

Glass matrices infused with nanoparticles have demonstrated to be suitable materials formany technological applications, like optical fibers, light emission, and potential radiationapplications. Borate glasses as developed by Vallejo et al. [Vallejo, 2020] have beenexhaustively characterized in terms of morphology and size distributions as well asmechanical and optical properties. Six novel borate glass formulations, activated with metaltransition nanoparticles, have been synthetized and preliminarily characterized by means ofdifferent analytic techniques, like electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, among others.However, potential implementations of borate glasses in radiation applications are stronglydependent upon the radiological properties as well as the corresponding performance uponirradiation. In this regard, this work reports on the characterization of the most relevantradiological properties of six novel borate glass formulations by means of Monte Carloapproaches implemented by adapting Monte Carlo subroutines based on two independentMonte Carlo main codes, namely PENELOPE [Salvat, 2018] and FLUKA [Battistoni,2016]. Relevant radiological properties have been assessed, including mass density,effective atomic number, mean excitation energy, mass attenuation coefficient, electronrange, electron stopping power and mean free path. Moreover, the performance of thedifferent borate glasses for X-ray irradiations has been evaluated by means of thecorresponding in-depth spectral degradation. Effects due to the corresponding concentrationof metallic nanoparticles have been studied, whereas comparisons among the Monte Carlocodes provide excellent agreements.[1] M. A. Vallejo, J. A. Elias, M. Honorato, P. V. Ceron, C. Gomez-Solis, C. Wiechers, R. Navarro,M. Sosa. Silver Nanoparticles Enhance Thermoluminescence and Photoluminescence Response inLi 2 B 4 O 7 Glass Doped with Dy 3+ and Yb 3+ . J. Fluoresc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10895-019-02479-w,2020.[2] F. Salvat et al. PENELOPE-2018: A Code System for Monte Carlo Simulation of Electron andPhoton Transport, OECD-NEA, 2018.[3] Battistoni, G. et. al., Front. Oncol. 6 https://doi.org/10.3389/fonc.2016.00116, 2016.