This article presents the synthesis and the blend of bismuth complexes in polystyrene based plastic scintillators. A specific design has enabled the fabrication of a scintillator loaded with up to 17 wt% of bismuth. Tri-carboxylate and triaryl bismuth compounds were used to explore and understand the influence of bismuth loading on the two main criteria of plastic scintillation: light yield and detection efficiency of g-rays. For gamma radiation with an energy <200 keV, bismuth loaded scintillators demonstrate the ability to produce a photoelectric peak (total absorption peak) in pulse height spectra.The increase of interactions due to bismuth doping was quantified and fitted with standard models.Finally the performance of our bismuth loaded scintillators was evaluated to be better than that of a commercial lead loaded counterpart.

This work aims at developing a generic virtual source model (VSM) preserving all existing correlations between variables stored in a Monte Carlo pre-computed phase space (PS) file, for dose calculation and high-resolution portal image prediction. The reference PS file was calculated using the PENELOPE code, after the flattening filter (FF) of an Elekta Synergy 6 MV photon beam. Each particle was represented in a mobile coordinate system by its radial position (r s ) in the PS plane, its energy (E), and its polar and azimuthal angles (φ d and θ d ), describing the particle deviation compared to its initial direction after bremsstrahlung, and the deviation orientation. Three sub-sources were created by sorting out particles according to their last interaction location (target, primary collimator or FF). For each sub-source, 4D correlated-histograms were built by storing E, r s , φ d and θ d values. Five different adaptive binning schemes were studied to construct 4D histograms of the VSMs, to ensure histogram efficient handling as well as an accurate reproduction of E, r s , φ d and θ d distribution details. The five resulting VSMs were then implemented in PENELOPE. Their accuracy was first assessed in the PS plane, by comparing E, r s , φ d and θ d distributions with those obtained from the reference PS file. Second, dose distributions computed in water, using the VSMs and the reference PS file located below the FF, and also after collimation in both water and heterogeneous phantom, were compared using a 1.5%-0 mm and a 2%-0 mm global gamma index, respectively. Finally, portal images were calculated without and with phantoms in the beam. The model was then evaluated using a 1%-0 mm global gamma index. Performance of a mono-source VSM was also investigated and led, as with the multi-source model, to excellent results when combined with an adaptive binning scheme.

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