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Organic X-ray detectors

Scintillating observations

Nature Reviews Chemistry volume 6, page 840 (2022)Cite this article

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Scintillators are used to obtain X-ray images by converting X-ray photons into visible light, and are typically made from ceramics or perovskites, which require harsh conditions to produce and can have poor air and light stability. Organic scintillators are promising replacements because they are cheap, mechanically flexible and easy to process. However, organic scintillators have poor X-ray absorption capabilities owing to the low effective atomic number of their constituent elements, meaning that they have low detection sensitivities. Now, writing in Nature Photonics, Omar F. Mohammed and colleagues show that the X-ray absorption of a promising class of organic scintillators — thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) chromophores — can be increased through the addition of heavy atoms, without compromising the optical properties of the scintillator.

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  1. Nature Reviews Chemistry http://www.nature.com/natrevchem/

    Hannah Hatcher

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  1. Hannah Hatcher
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Correspondence to Hannah Hatcher.

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Hatcher, H. Scintillating observations. Nat Rev Chem 6, 840 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-022-00445-y

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