FTIR, electronic polarizability and shielding parameters of B2O3 glasses doped with SnO2

Abstract

In this work, six glass samples with nominal compositions (35Li2O–10ZnO–55B2O3) + (xSnO2: 0 ≤ x ≤ 3 wt%) have been prepared by solid state reaction method. Spectra of UV–visible absorption for these glasses have been performed in wavelength within the range 200–1100 nm. FTIR has been recorded in the range of 4000–400 cm−1 to estimate the vibrational modes in the samples. The direct and indirect optical energy band gap ( $$E_{{\text{g}}}^{{{\text{ASF}}}}$$ ) and the corresponding refractive index (n) have been calculated by absorption spectrum fitting model. Molar refraction (Rm), polarizability (αm), reflection loss (RL), and optical transmission (T) for the glass samples have been evaluated. Moreover, the mass attenuation coefficients (µ/ρ) have been evaluated using the Monte Carlo code (MCNPX, version 2.6.0) in the energy range 0.356–1.33 MeV to understand the radiation shielding properties for the prepared glasses. From the µ/ρ values, we have calculated some other parameters such as effective atomic number (Zeff), the half value layer, and the mean free path for the present glass samples. The results revealed that the investigated glass samples are promising for the laser stimulated nonlinear optics and the composition with the highest value of SnO2 content (3.0 wt%) is encouraging candidate for nuclear radiation shielding.