The investigation of scintillation properties of gadolinium doped zinc oxide nanoparticles for nuclear radiation detection

摘要

In this work, zinc oxide and gadolinium doped zinc oxide nanoparticles were prepared via a simple co-precipitation method. The X-ray diffraction and Raman analyses confirmed the formation of hexagonal wurtzite of zinc oxide nanoparticles and good crystallinity without any impurity phase. According to the FESEM images, a hexagonal structure was formed in these nanoparticles and the average size of the particles is agreed well with that obtained from XRD analysis. The photoluminescence study showed the enhancement of blue and green luminescence by introducing gadolinium ions into zinc oxide lattice crystal. The scintillation properties of gadolinium doped zinc oxide nanoparticles were investigated using ~(241)Am alpha and ~(207)Bi beta sources. The results demonstrated that the Zn_(0.995)Gd_(0.005)O sample has an acceptable counting efficiency and can be used as a good candidate to fabricate efficient scintillators for radiation detection.