Effect of Crystal Size and Ag Concentration on the Thermoluminescent Response of Pure and Ag-Doped LiF Cubes

Abstract

In this paper, the co-precipitation method was used to synthesize pure and Ag-doped LiF crystals and the effect of crystalline cube sizes and Ag concentration on the thermoluminescent (TL) response is reported. The synthesized materials were characterized by scanning electron microscopy and their morphology and size distributions were determined. Crystal sizes were found to be strongly dependent on the ethanol:water ratio, varying from 4.1[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m to 150[Formula: see text]nm for pure LiF crystals. For Ag-doped samples, the best ethanol:water ratio was found to be 9:1, giving crystals from 0.50[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m to 1.21[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m. A single cubic crystalline phase was determined by XRD for all synthesized samples. The photoluminescence spectra as well as UV-Vis absorbance were also analyzed. The TL response to X-ray irradiation was studied for an exposition of 43[Formula: see text]R. Two effects were observed in the TL response. The first concerns with a significant dependence of the TL intensity on the size of the crystals, being larger for the smallest crystals for pure LiF, and second, for Ag-doped samples the TL intensity augmented almost linearly with the Ag concentration.