Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Cuprous Halide Scintillators for Flexible X-ray Imaging.

Abstract

Recently, organic-inorganic hybrid scintillators have received more and more attention because of their merits of easy preparation, good stability, and nontoxicity. Considering the high cost of traditional inorganic scintillators, here we describe experimental investigations of a low-cost zero-dimensional scintillator comprising organic-inorganic hybrid cuprous halide and its capabilities for sensitive X-ray detection and flexible X-ray imaging. This scintillator is synthesized using a facile antisolvent diffusion method with large scalability (50 g). The crystal structure shows an unreported plane rhombus cuprous halide core, which also demonstrates outstanding photoluminescence with a high quantum yield (99.5%), excellent radioluminescence with an efficient internal light yield (25 000 photon/MeV), and sensitive X-ray response with a low detection limit (40.4 nGy/s). The organic-inorganic hybrid chemical feature allows the fabrication of a flexible film based on this scintillator for fine-resolution X-ray radiography. These advantages endow our organic-inorganic hybrid scintillator with promising potential in wearable and portable medical devices.