Radiation Monitoring With Radiosensitive Pure-Silica Core Ultralow Loss Optical Fiber

This article presents a new prospect for radiation detection exploiting the high radiation sensitivity of an ultralow-loss pure-silica core optical fiber (ULL-PSCF). This fiber exhibits very high transient X-ray radiation-induced attenuation (RIA) levels from UV to IR during irradiation, while its RIA quickly returns to a low permanent level after irradiation. In this work, the RIA kinetics are investigated exposing the ULL-PSCF to multiple short irradiation runs at different dose rates. Preirradiation has been demonstrated to stabilize the response of the optical fiber (OF) and to make it even more appealing for radiation detection and monitoring. After this preirradiation treatment, the RIAs at 620 and 1310 nm, in particular, exhibit an
on/off
behavior: the permanent RIA is nearly zero in-between irradiation and the transient RIA quickly increases up to the dB/m level when the ULL-PSCF is exposed to X-rays. By varying the fiber length and adapting the interrogation setup, large ranges of doses and dose rates can be detected with this new class of OFs.