Scintillating properties of pure and doped BGO ceramics

The ceramic processing and characterization of Bi4Ge3O12 pure and doped with Eu3+ and Nd3+ was performed in order to investigate its potential use in radiation detector devices. Single phase Bi4Ge3O12 in pure state and containing 1% of the dopands Nd3+ and Eu3+ were produced via a solid state route and their photoluminescent and radioluminescent properties were investigated. When excited at 200-230 nm, pure BGO ceramics presented a wide photoluminescent band emission centered at 450 nm, assigned to the Bi3+ internal transitions. For the doped samples under the same excitation, this wide band was superposed by the emission peaks of the rare earth dopands, at around 600 nm for BGO:Eu3+ and at 350 nm, 430 and 600 nm for BGO:Nd3+. Radioluminescence measurements presented similar results and allowed the determination of the light output efficiency of the three scintillators. The values determined were 4 x 10(3) photons/MeV for BGO:Nd and 5.9 x 10(3) photons/MeV for BGO:Eu, which are higher than the value 3.9 x 10(3) photons/MeV determined previously for the pure ceramic. A selective sensibility of the BGO:Eu ceramics to the nature and energy of the radiation, which is not observed in pure samples, was also presented and discussed.