Exploring improvement of optical properties of glasses by doping with organic scintillating activator

Up to now, methods of preparation of scintillating glasses can not meet simultaneously all main requirements such as high light output, high density, short decaying time, low cost and good resistance to radiation. Our aim is to get nearer to meeting all these requirements and, we believe, our exploration has revealed some technical possibilities that will help us to reach our aim. A series of organic/inorganic scintillating glasses were developed by doping organic scintillation activator into low melting phosphate glasses and the optical properties such as fluorescence spectra and light output of these glasses were explored in detail. Results show that the glasses doped with POPOP, p-TP, p-QP, and PPO all have relatively weak light outputs regardless of the concentrations of the dopants. The main reason for weak light output is, we believe, that the optical transmittance is very low because of the existence of defects formed during doping. Another reason, we believe, is that the actual concentrations of dopants in the glasses are much lower those that-we designed because of the evaporation of dopants during doping. To improve the light outputs of the glasses, the optical transmittances of them must be improved and the concentrations of dopants in the glasses must be increased. A second dopant was doped into the glasses as a wavelength shifter and it did not seem to have detectable effect on the light output of scintillating glasses. The fluorescence emission peaks of the dopants in the doped glasses move to longer wavelengths compared with those in organic matrixes. For this reason, POPOP does not serve as a wavelength shifter but as an organic activator in the glasses.