A hot exciton organic glassy scintillator for high-resolution X-ray imaging†

Abstract

Hot exciton organic scintillators offer promising prospects due to their efficient generation of bright triplet excitons and ultrafast response time, having potential applications in security detection and medical diagnostics. However, fabricating large-area, highly transparent scintillator screens still remains challenging, impeding the realization of high-resolution X-ray imaging. Herein, we firstly demonstrate a novel highly-transparent hot exciton organic glassy scintillator (>87% transmittance @ 450–800 nm), produced using a low-temperature melt-quenching method with 2′,5′-difluoro-N4,N4,N4′′,N4′′-tetraphenyl-[1,1′:4′,1′′-terphenyl]-4,4′′-diamine (DTPA2F) powder. Remarkably, compared to crystalline DTPA2F, which has a photoluminescence quantum yield of 67.8% and a relative light yield of 46 400 ± 406 photons MeV⁻¹, the DTPA2F glass retains 49.8% and 28 341 ± 246 photons MeV⁻¹, respectively. This results in a low detection limit of about 53.7 nGy s⁻¹ and an ultrafast decay time of 1.66 ns for DTPA2F glass. Besides, it exhibits excellent environmental stability with no recrystallization or degradation after over 100 days of exposure to ambient conditions. Furthermore, the scintillator screen demonstrates exceptional spatial resolution of 38.5 lp mm⁻¹ for X-ray imaging. It provides a simple molecular design strategy and a screen fabrication method for developing large-area, highly-transparent, efficient and ultrafast organic glassy scintillators.