Exploring the optical gamma radiation shielding features of barium and zinc doped fluorotellurite glasses: A comparative study with other glass systems

This work reported the optical and radiation shielding features of fluorotellurite glasses with varying contents of TeO₂, ZnF₂, and BaF₂ (coded as TeZnBa glasses). The refractive index of the glasses was found to be in the range of 2.27–2.31, while the dielectric constant is the range of 5.15–5.32, and the optical dielectric constant between 4.15 and 4.31. It was found that the reflection loss varies from 0.1561 to 0.1511 with BaF₂ content increasing from 10 to 30 mol% while it varies from 0.1554 to 0.1507 at constant BaF₂ content (10 mol%) and varying ZnF₂ content (20–30 mol%). On the other hand, we explored the application of this glass system for radiation shielding by comparing its competency with other similar glass materials. We used the mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) and the effective atomic number (Z_eff) as two essential radiation shielding parameters. We compared the mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) for the TeZnBa glasses with TeO₂-Li₂O-ZnO glass system at 0.662 MeV. We found that the TeZnBa1 has close MAC with 80TeO₂-15Li₂O-5ZnO glass, whereas TeZnBa4 has close MAC with 65TeO₂-15Li₂O-20ZnO glass. Also, we compared the MAC for the TeZnBa glasses with ZnO-MoO₃-TeO₂ glass system. The comparison demonstrated that TeZnBa1 has very close MAC with 20ZnO-20MoO₃-60TeO₂ sample, while TeZnBa2 and TeZnBa3 have better attenuation ability than all the ZnO-MoO₃-TeO₂ glass system. We also compared the MAC for the selected glasses with other glasses contain heavy metal oxides such as BaO-Li₂O-B₂O₃ and Bi₂O₃-SiO₂-Al₂O₃ glass systems.