Stephen W. S. McKeever - A Course in Luminescence Measurements and Analyses for Radiation Dosimetry

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The detection of ionizing radiation using luminescence methods has been at the forefront of radiation research ever since the earliest discoveries of radiation, radioactivity, and the structure of the atom. The list of pioneering names in the discovery of radiation is lengthy and impressive – Wilhelm Roentgen, Edmond and Henri Becquerel, Ernest Rutherford, Marie Curie, James Chadwick, and numerous others. Many of these pioneers used luminescence of one type or form in their studies, including (using the modern names) phosphorescence, thermoluminescence, and optically stimulated luminescence. Today’s researchers use these techniques and others related to them in a wide range of radiation detection and measurement applications, including personal, environmental, medical, and space dosimetry, and embrace both very low as well as very high radiation dose regimes.

The genesis of this book is a course, given by the author, to graduate students at Oklahoma State University. The intended readers are graduate students (and undergraduate students who are performing research in these areas), and other beginning researchers in this field of study (e.g., postdoctoral fellows and new researchers entering the field). More experienced researchers may also find the book helpful to refresh their conceptual understanding of the topics. The benefit to the reader will be to see how the techniques relate in a holistic manner and to see how the fundamental processes that describe the phenomena can be used to explain many different experimental characteristics.

To new researchers entering the field, the array of measurement and data analysis techniques can be bewildering. Experimental collection of the data may seem simple on first introduction, but useful and reliable analysis requires attention to small details and knowledge of fundamental principles, along with very careful experimental technique. A phrase I often used with my students was that they will spend most of their time learning how to do the experiment properly before they have a reliable data set for analysis. And then what of that analysis? How should they interpret the results that they obtain? What is the best analytical approach, and why?

What this book is : This book presents a course of instruction for beginning students, or for more-experienced researchers new to the field, into three of the main and currently used luminescence phenomena in radiation dosimetry, namely, thermoluminescence (TL), optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and radiophotoluminescence (RPL). The book outlines the theoretical background of each technique and stresses the connections between them. In doing so, the book treats luminescence techniques for radiation dosimetry holistically, beginning with the basic concepts and showing how the three techniques are related within the processes of energy storage, charge transfer, and defect interactions.