Abstract
Efficient and fast scintillators are in high demand in a variety of fields, such as medical diagnostics, scientific instruments and high-energy physics. However, the trade-off between high scintillation efficiency and fast timing properties is a common challenge facing almost all scintillators. To overcome this limitation, we have developed a strategy for organic scintillators by directing all hot excitons into fast singlet emission states without involving the lowest triplet states. Our scintillator, 1,1,2,2-tetrakis(4-bromophenyl)ethylene, shows an ultrafast radiative lifetime of 1.79 ns and a light yield of ∼34,600 photons per MeV, exhibiting an excellent combination of high light yield and short decay time. Our work provides a method to design efficient and ultrafast scintillators, and paves the way towards exciting applications for ultrafast detection and imaging.
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Data availability
The main data that support the findings of this study are available in this Article and its Supplementary Information. Additional data are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Crystallographic data for TPE-4Br have been deposited at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre under deposition number CCDC 1837774. A copy of the data can be obtained free of charge via https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/structures/.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (2021YFB3201000 and 2018YFA0703200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62134003, 62074066, U23A20359, 62204092 and 12050005), the Chinese Academy of Sciences Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (YSBR-024), the Fund for the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2021CFA036 and 2020CFA034), the Shenzhen Basic Research Program (JCYJ20200109115212546), the HCP Program of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, the Innovation Fund of Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and the project funded by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2023T160242), the Innovation Project of Optics Valley Laboratory (OVL2023ZD002). We acknowledge X. Li from Nanjing University of Science and Technology for their help with the X-ray-excited luminescence lifetime characterization, and Y. Gao from China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) for their discussion on the hot exciton emission mechanism.
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J.T. and G.N. supervised the whole project. G.N. conceived the idea. X.D., S.Z. and H.W. carried out most of the material characterization and device optimization. L.W., F.Y., K.-H.X., D.Z. and Z.X. performed the theoretical simulations and analysed the results. S.P. and J.X. carried out the transient absorption characterization. Z.S. performed the CTR measurements and analysed the results. Z.Z. and L.X. assisted in the data analysis. J.T., G.N. and X.D. analysed the results and wrote the paper; all authors commented on the manuscript.
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Nature Photonics thanks Qibing Pei, Valery Bliznyuk and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Text, Figs. 1–31 and Tables 1–6.
Supplementary Video 1
The bubbling process in solution captured using the TPE-4Br scintillator screen.
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Du, X., Zhao, S., Wang, L. et al. Efficient and ultrafast organic scintillators by hot exciton manipulation. Nat. Photon. 18, 162–169 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01358-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01358-y
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