EPR dosimetry of glass substrate of mobile phone LCDs

Previous studies have shown that mineral glass from watches, windows and displays of personal electronic devices could be a suitable restrospective dosimeter in case of radiation accident. In this paper glass substrates of the window display of 100 mobile phones of different trademarks were analized by X-band cw-EPR before and after irradiation at 100 Gy. The objective of this study was to highlight some issues of EPR measurements of glass related to inter-sample variability of: i) signal line shape in irradiated and unirradiated glass; ii) signal intensity loss and line shape change with post-irradiation time; iii) signal changes induced by sample preparation and iv) signal changes induced by thermal annealing. Scope of the paper is to provide a phenomenological picture of the observed effects in order to give a warning about possible problems and to provide suggestions for future work. Explanation of the mechanisms and the causes leading to the observed effects was beyond the scope of this work. These preliminary results confirm that glass substrate of mobile phone displays should be considered as a fortuitous dosimeter in radiation accidents. However, albeit very promising, mineral glass presents a number of issues that should be thoroughly investigated and addressed in future work.