journal article·2022-02Open access

Thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) organic molecules for efficient X-ray scintillation and imaging

Wenbo Ma, Yirong Su, Qisheng Zhang, Chao Deng, Luca Pasquali, Wenjuan Zhu, Yue Tian, Peng Ran, Zeng Chen, Gaoyuan Yang, Guijie Liang, Tianyu Liu, Haiming Zhu, Peng Huang, Haizheng Zhong, Kangwei Wang, Shaoqian Peng, Jianlong Xia, Huafeng Liu, Xu Liu, Yang Michael Yang

Nature Materials· Volume 21· Issue 2

Abstract

X-ray detection, which plays an important role in medical and industrial fields, usually relies on inorganic scintillators to convert X-rays to visible photons; although several high-quantum-yield fluorescent molecules have been tested as scintillators, they are generally less efficient. High-energy radiation can ionize molecules and create secondary electrons and ions. As a result, a high fraction of triplet states is generated, which act as scintillation loss channels. Here we found that X-ray-induced triplet excitons can be exploited for emission through very rapid, thermally activated up-conversion. We report scintillators based on three thermally activated delayed fluorescence molecules with different emission bands, which showed significantly higher efficiency than conventional anthracene-based scintillators. X-ray imaging with 16.6 line pairs mm-1 resolution was also demonstrated. These results highlight the importance of efficient and prompt harvesting of triplet excitons for efficient X-ray scintillation and radiation detection.
Source: europepmc · Quality: candidate unverified · Source record ↗

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Luminescence and Fluorescent Materials · Lanthanide and Transition Metal Complexes · Organic Light-Emitting Diodes Research

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

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