Investigation of LED Stimulated Recovery of Radiation Damage in Optical Materials

Abstract

The radiation damage in the optical active media of collider detectors and beamline instrumentation is an outstanding problem. The exposed doses reach unprecedented levels in some current and projected implementations. In order to mitigate this, the development of optical materials with higher radiation resistance is underway. On the other hand, there is a significant lack of in-situ radiation damage recovery systems, whereas such systems have the potential to increase the useful lifetime of the optical materials considerably. Although it is well-known that stimulating the recovery of radiation damage with LED illumination significantly improves the recovery rate and the ultimate damage, a systematic study of the recovery e.g. as a function of the incident LED light spectra, intensity and exposure duration has not been performed. Here we attempt to do this study and present our first results of recovery from radiation damage under different recovery conditions.