MoO3-TeO2 glass system for gamma ray shielding applications

This paper examines the gamma-ray shielding features of some selected tellurite-based glasses in the form of xMoO(3)(100-x)TeO2 (20 <= x <= 50 mol%). Mass attenuation coefficients (mu(m)) of these glasses have been calculated using Geant4 toolkit and XCOM program for photon energy range of 1 keV-1000 MeV. The correlation factor (R-2) between these two methods was found to be almost one. Shielding effectiveness for these glasses has been estimated by computing half value layer (HVL), effective atomic number (Z(eff)), and mean free paths (MFP). It was noticed that the heavy metal oxide of TeO2 plays an important role in improving the shielding effectiveness of the glasses. The Mo20Te80 glass has shown the promising properties to serve for gamma ray protection applications as compared with many conventional concretes and other newly developed glasses.