Glass-ceramics and epoxy-composites for radiation imaging

We report the results of optical, photo-luminescence and spatial resolution measurements on glass-ceramic and epoxy-composite X-ray storage phosphors. We find that the optical extinction coefficient at the stimulation and emission wavelengths is dominated by scattering for all the samples studied. However, the extinction coefficient is at least an order of magnitude lower in ZBLAN:BaCl2:Eu2+ZBLAN:BaCl2:Eu2+ glass-ceramics when compared with the epoxy/BaCl2:Eu2+epoxy/BaCl2:Eu2+ composites. Significantly reduced scattering is found in a epoxy/KBr:Eu2+epoxy/KBr:Eu2+ composite due to the better match between the refractive indices of the epoxy and crystallite. We show that the spatial resolution using a confocal microscope readout in a ZBLAN:BaCl2:Eu2+ZBLAN:BaCl2:Eu2+ glass-ceramic is below 10μm and hence this glass-ceramic has potential applications in high resolution radiation imaging.