Investigation of spodumene TLD response to monoenergetic neutron fields

The application of ionizing radiations in different fields requires the use of equipment capable of detecting their presence or quantifying them. Detectors of the most different shapes, composition and characteristics are required to cover the full range of application of ionizing radiations. At present, thermoluminescent detectors (TLD) are the most widely employed for individual gamma monitoring. Thermoluminescence (TL) is a process in which heated insulator or semiconductor emits the light in correlation with the previous absorption of energy from ionizing radiation. Several materials that present high intense TL are used as TLD to measure radiation doses for manifold applications, including the neutron dosimetry, where nowadays a sufficiently reliable method, covering the whole range of neutron energies, does not exist. For neutron dosimetry applications, elements with large neutron cross section (as 6Li and 10B for thermal neutrons) are added to the basic components of TLD. Generally, because the neutron cross section depends markedly of the neutron energy, there are different detectors for thermal neutrons and fast neutrons. The 10B(n,)7Li reaction is most often used for detection of thermal neutrons; while the reaction 6Li(n,)3H is also used in the neutron albedo detectors. In this work, a series of preliminary measurements investigating the neutron response of spodumene TLD crystals (LiAlSi2O6) is described.