Optical, physical, mechanical, structural, and radiation shielding investigations of B2O3-TeO2-GeO2-MgO-PbO for ionizing protection and optical transmission application

This study aims to investigate a new heavy glass system's potential use in the radiation shielding and optical transmission applications. Glass former like borate is replaced in this work by heavy metal oxides like lead oxide in the following glass system: (35-x) B2O3-20TeO2-10GeO2-35MgO-xPbO (where x = 2.5, 5, 7.5, and 10 mol%). Through the melt-annealing process, four transparent glasses were synthesized. A number of physical properties were reported, namely the boron-boron separation x 10-8 m, field strength x 1018 (cm2), inter nuclear distance x 10-8 m, ion concentration (N) x 1023 (ion cm3), molar volume (cm3/mol), molecular weight (g/mol), and polaron radius x 10-9 m. Moreover, the following mechanical and structural properties of the synthesized glasses were explored: bulk modulus (B, GPa), dissociation energy (kcal/cm3), fractal bond connectivity (d), longitudinal modulus (L, GPa), hardness (H, GPa), oxygen packing density, packing density (Vt), oxygen molar volume, packing factor (Vi), shear modulus (S, GPa), Poisson radius (sigma), and Young modulus (Y, GPa). To study the bulk glasses' nature, the X-ray diffraction was examined. Optical absorption along with optical transmission profile have been recorded to extract various optical properties, as well as the direct and indirect band gap. The transmittance spectra of the prepared glass samples' FTIR were investigated within the 400-2000 cm-1 range. This allowed for the examination of molecular structural groups and vibrational modes. Radiation shielding parameters have been calculated and studied using XCOM software and MCNP-5 algorithm.