The energy response of LiF:Mg,Ti radioluminescent detector: A Monte Carlo simulation and experimental tests

It has been reported that LiF as commonly used thermoluminescent dosimeter (TLD) has a flat energy response, yet the energy dependence as radioluminescent (RL) detector has not been reported up to now. LiF is a near-tissue-equivalent material with a low effective atomic number, leading to its intrinsic virtue of flat energy response, theoretically. In this paper, Super-MC software was employed to simulate the energy deposition of LiF, the energy response of which was compared with NaI, and then the influence of the size of the detector on energy response was also investigated. Finally, the experimental verification of RL energy response was performed based on an in-house developed detector coupled LiF:Mg,Ti crystal with SiPM. The experimental energy responses (with respect to 137Cs) of three volume detector show good agreement (within ±30% in the range of 33 keV–1.25 MeV) with MC simulation results, which proved that LiF:Mg,Ti has a flat energy response, and it is feasible to obtain real-time dose-rate from count-rate collection without traditional method of hardware compensation or energy spectrum acquisition. In conclusion, this scheme can be a promising candidate for the rapid and accurate real-time dosimetry in the future, simplifying detector structure and measurement algorithm.