An Assessment of Non-linear Dose Response in Chemiluminescence Dosimetry

INTRODUCTION Sugar and sorbite are well known to be convenient and suitable materials for chemiluminescence(CL) as well as electron spin resonance(ESR) dosimetry, in particular for retrospective dose assessment in an emergency and/or accident situation, mainly because of their close tissue-equivalence. In practice, however, the dose-CL response of those materials are not always shown to be satisfactorily linear. An attempt was made in this study to evaluate and correct the early supralinear dose-CL relationship appeared in the sugar and sorbite samples irradiated to gamma-ray doses of 0.5 to 10 Gy. In consideration of a similarity of the non-linear CL-dose relationship with the initial supralinearity shown in TL-dose response as depicted by Aitken, several recently proposed methods of expressing non-linear dose responses of TL, ESR or CL outputs were examined and investigated in order to look for a fittest means for the assessment of our supralinear dose-CL response of sugar and sorbite. As a result of an extensive study, merits and demerits of each method of representing non-linear dose response could be figured out in the light of our particular dose-CL relationship appeared in the sugar and sorbite samples.