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X-ray scintillators are scintillation-based detectors, which absorb and down convert high-energy ionizing radiation into ultraviolet-visible light for detection of X-rays. They are actively used in many areas, including medical imaging, non-invasive inspection, radiation monitoring, and so on. Most of commercially available X-ray scintillators are based on inorganic single crystals, which are prepared via energy-consuming high temperature processes. To reduce energy consumption for material preparation, many organic scintillators have been developed via low temperature processes, which however have inferior performance than inorganic ones with low scintillation light yields and resolutions. Another issue of inorganic single crystal X-ray scintillators is the lack of flexibility, which could limit their applications in many areas where curved surfaces are present. It is there of great interest to develop new generation high performance X-ray scintillators that could be facilely prepared, flexible, and eco-friendly. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts on the development and study of highly efficient eco-friendly X-ray scintillation materials based on organic metal halide hybrids, which exhibit many advantages over conventional X-ray scintillation materials, e.g. (i) facile preparation via wet chemistry at room temperature using low cost rare-earth free raw materials, (ii) tunable visible emissions with near-unity photoluminescence quantum efficiencies, and (iii) higher light yields than most of conventional commercially available scintillators. X-ray imaging tests have shown that these new scintillators provide an excellent visualization tool for X-ray radiography, and high resolution flexible scintillators can be fabricated by blending these materials with appropriate polymers.
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