Wide-Range Color-Tunable Organic Scintillators for X-Ray Imaging Through Host-Guest Doping

With the increasing demands of X-ray detection and medical diagnosis, organic scintillators with intense and tunable X-ray excited emission have been becoming important. To guarantee the X-ray absorption, heavy atoms were widely added in reported organic scintillators, which led to emission quenching. In this work, we propose a new strategy to realize organic scintillators through the host-guest doping strategy. Then the X-ray absorption centers (host) and emission centers (guest) are separated. Under X-ray excitation, these materials displayed intense and readily tunable emissions ranging from green (520 nm) to near infrared (NIR) regions (682 nm). Besides, the relationship between the X-ray absorption and spatial arrangement of the heavy atoms in the host matrix was also revealed. The potential application of these wide-range color tunable organic host-guest scintillators in X-ray imaging were demonstrated. This work provides a new feasible strategy for constructing high-performance organic scintillators with tunable luminescence properties. A new strategy to achieve organic scintillators through constructing host-guest doping system was demonstrated. When doping guest materials with different triplet state energy levels, readily tunable emissions ranging from green (520 nm) to near infrared (NIR) regions (682 nm) were achieved under X-ray excitation. The developed system also enabled color-tunable NIR X-ray imaging and provided a convenient visualization tool for X-ray radiography.image