Radioluminescence of red-emitting Eu-doped phosphors for fiberoptic dosimetry

P MOLINA; M SANTIAGO; J MARCAZZÓ; F SPANO; E CASELLI

Ciudad de México

Congreso; XII INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM XXII NATIONAL CONGRESS ON SOLID STATE DOSIMETRY; 2011

The fiber optic dosimetry technique (FOD) has become an attractive method for in–vivo real–time dosimetry in radiotherapy. It is based on the use of a tiny piece of scintillator coupled to the end of an optical fiber, which collects the light emitted by the scintillator during irradiation (radioluminescence, RL). Carbon-doped aluminum oxide (Al2O3:C) is one of the most used RL materials for FOD due to its high efficiency but it presents the drawback of emitting in the spectral region, where spurious luminescence is also important (Andersen et al., 2010). Spurious luminescence from optical fiber, termed stem effect, is the main problem afflicting FOD. Several techniques have been applied to remove the stem effect. Optical filtering, which consists in using long–pass filters, is the simplest one. This technique is useful when red-emitting scintillators are employed. In this work, the feasibility of using red-emitting Eu-doped phosphors as FOD scintillators has been investigated.