Open AccessHigh-sensitivity fiber-optic X-ray detectors employing gadolinium oxysulfide composites
Author(s) -
Kaifeng Chen,
Jiwei Ren,
Chen Zhao,
Feiyi Liao,
Dengpeng Yuan,
Lin Lei,
Yiying Zhao
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - Uncategorized
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.431770
Subject(s) - scintillator , detector , materials science , optical fiber , optics , sensitivity (control systems) , detection limit , optoelectronics , particle detector , x ray detector , physics , electronic engineering , statistics , mathematics , engineering
Radiation detection technologies have been applied in broad fields such as security inspection, medical diagnosis, environment monitoring and scientific analysis. Fiber-optic radiation detectors exhibit unique advantages including miniaturization, resistance to water, remote monitoring, and distributable detection. However, the low sensitivity and the high limit-of-detection limit its practical applications. Herein we demonstrated high-performance fiber-optic X-ray detectors with scintillating composites consisting of UV glue and uniformly distributed gadolinium oxysulfide (GADOX) powders. The impacts of the length, thickness and GADOX weight ratio of the composite coating upon the detector performance, were systematically investigated in terms of the generation and the coupling efficiency of radio-luminescence. Besides the high-performance scintillator, the scattering loss and the geometric factor greatly affected the detector performance. A higher sensitivity and lower limit-of-detection could be achieved by increasing the GADOX weight ratio and decreasing the thickness simultaneously. The optimal detector with the highest GADOX weight ratio (70%), exhibited a linear sensitivity to the X-ray dose rate within 31-1575 µGy air /s, and a low limit-of-detection of ∼0.26 µGy air /s at a tube voltage of 120 kV. The mechanism discussed here will provide insightful guidance for further development of fiber-optic radiation detectors and these promising results demonstrate the potential applications of fiber-optic detectors.