The impact of lead oxide on the optical and gamma shielding properties of barium borate glasses

In this study, the optical properties and gamma-ray competence of barium–lead borate glasses with chemical form BaO–B2O3–PbO have been investigated. The optical features such as optical energy gap (Eoptical), linear refractive index (n), molar refraction (Rmolar), molar polarizability (αmolar), metallization criterion (M), dielectric constants (static and optical), reflection loss (Rloss), optical transmission (Toptical) and others for the investigated glasses were calculated. Results show that Eoptical measures in (eV) and Eoptical values were changed from 3.18 to 2.53 eV, while n increases from 2.350 to 2.536. Phy-X/PSD software has been applied to report the radiation attenuation factors of the tested glasses. The results implied that all samples have the high attenuation ability at lower energies and the maximum µ/ρ is reported at 15 keV and lies within the range of 29.398 and 68.228 cm2/g. The minimum effective atomic number (Zeff) occurs at 1.5 MeV and equals to 10.90, 11.30, 12.41, 13.57, 16.79 and 20.55 for the tested glasses. At 0.2 MeV, the Zeff changes from 19.42 to 49.10 due to the increase of PbO from 0.5 to 30 wt%. The half value layer (HVL) results revealed that the current glasses have very low HVL values at the 15 keV (in the range of 0.00202 to 0.00671 cm). The HVL increases with the energy which indicates that the photon with high energy can penetrate the samples easily. The HVL results also showed that increasing the density of the samples leading to reduce the HVL and BBP30 has the thinner HVL, while BBP0.5 has the thicker HVL.