Impact of high LET radiation on various properties of CR-39 detector

Abstract

Since polyallyl diglycol carbonate (PADC), viz. CR-39 has been widely used for radiation detection and measurement in various complex radiation fields, therefore, a systematic study has been carried out in this work to demonstrate the significant effect of linear energy transfer (LET) of heavy ions on the optical, structural and chemical (etching) properties of the detector. The PADC samples were exposed to heavy ions (7Li, 12C, 16O and 19F) of different energies to study the effect of LET from 76 to 1002 keV/μm. Samples were chemically processed to develop the latent tracks induced by heavy ions. Image analysis showed an increase in the damaged track size with the LET as well as the etching time. Having same energy, the track sizes of two different ions were found to be different because of the differences in their LET values. Similarly, for one particular ion, the track sizes were found to be smaller for higher energy due to low LET than that of the lower energy corresponding to high LET. Hence, this criterion is successfully demonstrated for particle identification by using PADC. Furthermore, spectrophotometric studies (UV–vis, FTIR) have been carried out to determine the changes in opacity, Urbach's energy, optical bandgap, molecular vibrations and red shift of the cut off wavelength with the increase in LET values.