Organic phosphors with bright triplet excitons for efficient X-ray-excited luminescence

By Xiao Wang, Huifang Shi, Huili Ma, Wenpeng Ye, Lulu Song, Jie Zan, Xiaokang Yao, Xiangyu Ou, Guohui Yang, Zhu Zhao and 19 more. Nature Photonics, 2020

364 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Materials that exhibit X-ray-excited luminescence have great potential in radiation detection, security inspection, biomedical applications and X-ray astronomy1–5. However, high-performance materials are almost exclusively limited to ceramic scintillators, which are typically prepared under high temperatures6. Herein we report metal-free organic phosphors based on a molecular design that supports efficient triplet exciton harvesting to enhance radioluminescence. These organic scintillators exhibit a detection limit of 33 nGy s–1, which is 167 times lower than the standard dosage for X-ray medical examination and we demonstrate their potential application in X-ray radiography. These findings provide a fundamental design principle and new route for the creation of promising alternatives to incumbent inorganic scintillators. Furthermore, they offer new opportunities for development of flexible, stretchable X-ray detectors and imagers for non-destructive radiography testing and medical imaging. Organic, metal-free materials that act as efficient X-ray scintillators could bring new opportunities for X-ray imaging.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8d85f289be7a77f69d930229de60494b1bc7272