Abstract
The effect of introducing SrO, TeO2, PbO, and Bi2O3 heavy metal oxides on the optical and the gamma ray shielding properties of Li2O-K2O-B2O3 glasses were studied in this work. The results demonstrated that the direct and indirect energy band gap values increased as the amount of SrO, TeO2, PbO, and Bi2O3 in the present glass samples increased. The value of the refractive index (n), dielectric constant (ε), and optical dielectric constant (pdpdt) all decreased with the increased presence of these oxides. The values of M were all less than 1, so it was concluded that the studied glass samples are non-metallic in nature. Additionally, the free online program Phy-X was used to compute the mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) of the glasses at 15 energies ranging from 0.0401 to 1.46 MeV. It was found that the MAC highly depends on the chosen oxides and is much more variable at low energies (E < 0.678 MeV), where the MAC values for the glasses with 10 mol% SrO, TeO2, PbO and Bi2O3 at 0.0401 MeV are 1.633, 3.737, 3.849 and 5.957 cm2/g, respectively. The linear attenuation coefficient for the glass with 10 Bi2O3 mol% is much greater than the value obtained for the glass with SrO. The average tenth value layer was calculated in two regions (0.122–0.867 MeV and 0.964–1.46 MeV) and is equal to the following values in the first energy region: 9.53, 8.64, 6.55 and 4.34 cm for the glasses with SrO, TeO2, PbO and Bi2O3, respectively.