Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescent Scintillators Based on Mononuclear Copper(I) Halide Complexes for High‐Resolution X‐Ray Imaging

Abstract

AbstractScintillators have attracted tremendous attention due to their great potential in radiation detection, industrial non‐destructive testing, and medical theranostic applications. Thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) based scintillators can simultaneously harvest radiation‐induced singlet and triplet excitons for high‐efficient X‐ray excited luminescence. However, pure organic TADF materials composed of light elements exhibit low X‐ray absorption coefficients, resulting in relatively weak X‐ray excited luminescence. Herein, a series of novel high‐performance X‐ray scintillators based on TADF mononuclear Cu(I)‐halide complexes are successfully developed. Together with high X‐ray absorption coefficient of heavy halogen elements and halide‐to‐ligand charge transfer characteristics, these TADF scintillators display excellent performance with high X‐ray relative light yields (as high as 28385 ± 1335 photons MeV−1), good linear response to X‐ray dose rate and high resistance to humidity and radiation. X‐ray imaging tests show that a relatively high spatial resolution of 9.8 lp/mm is realized based on their flexible scintillator films. These features suggest that it is a promising strategy to realize strong X‐ray excited luminescence by incorporating heavy halogen elements in TADF materials, providing more possibilities for exploring new low‐cost and high‐performance scintillators.