Thermoluminescence of ZnO:Na phosphors exposed to beta particle irradiation

In this work, the thermoluminescence (TL) characterization of pellet-shaped ZnO:Na phosphors synthesized through a controlled chemical reaction followed by thermal annealing at 900 °C in air is reported. X-Ray diffraction patterns reveal ZnO hexagonal zincite structure for the samples, some of which were exposed to beta particle irradiation in the dose range from 0.08 to 2048 Gy in order to study their TL features. The synthesized ZnO:Na samples are more than 200 times more sensitive than ZnO samples synthesized by the same method, and present a 0.02 (1/50) sensitivity relative to the TLD-100 dosimeter.