While there is great demand for effective, affordable radiation detectors in various applications, many commonly used scintillators have major drawbacks. Conventional inorganic scintillators have a fixed emission wavelength and require expensive, high-temperature synthesis; plastic scintillators, while fast, inexpensive, and robust, have low atomic numbers, limiting their X-ray stopping power. Formamidinium lead halide perovskite nanocrystals show promise as scintillators due to their high X-ray attenuation coefficient and bright luminescence. Here, we used a room-temperature, solution-growth method to produce mixed-halide FAPbX3 (X = Cl, Br) nanocrystals with emission wavelengths that can be varied between 403 and 531 nm via adjustments to the halide ratio. The substitution of bromine for increasing amounts of chlorine resulted in violet emission with faster lifetimes, while larger proportions of bromine resulted in green emission with increased luminescence intensity. By loading FAPbBr3 nanocrystals into a PVT-based plastic scintillator matrix, we produced 1 mm-thick nanocomposite scintillators, which have brighter luminescence than the PVT-based plastic scintillator alone. While nanocomposites such as these are often opaque due to optical scattering from aggregates of the nanoparticles, we used a surface modification technique to improve transmission through the composites. A composite of FAPbBr3 nanocrystals encapsulated in inert PMMA produced even stronger luminescence, with intensity 3.8× greater than a comparative FAPbBr3/plastic scintillator composite. However, the luminescence decay time of the FAPbBr3/PMMA composite was more than 3× slower than that of the FAPbBr3/plastic scintillator composite. We also demonstrate the potential of these lead halide perovskite nanocomposite scintillators for low-cost X-ray imaging applications.

We present work on the development of mixed-halide perovskite (CsPbClxBr(1−x)) nanocrystal scintillators for X-ray detection applications. The effect of the varying the halide composition on the resulting peak emission and light yield is discussed, with the CsPbBr3 materials displaying the greatest light yield. These perovskite nanocrystals were successfully loaded into PMMA, an inert plastic, at 2% mass weighting and the responses of these composites were compared to that of their colloidal dispersions. The composites were also characterised in terms of the radioluminescent light yield and decay response, alongside their X-ray sensitivity, in which the PMMA-CsPbBr3 composites again outperformed the materials containing Cl− anions.

We report a facile, solvent-free surfactant-dependent mechanochemical synthesis of highly luminescent CsPbBr 3 nanocrystals (NCs) and study their scintillation properties. A small amount of surfactant oleylamine (OAM) plays an important role in the two-step ball milling method to control the size and emission properties of the NCs. The solid-state synthesized perovskite NCs exhibit a high photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of up to 88% with excellent stability. CsPbBr 3 NCs capped with different amounts of surfactant were dispersed in toluene and mixed with polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) polymer and cast into scintillator discs. With increasing concentration of OAM during synthesis, the PL yield of CsPbBr 3 /PMMA nanocomposite was increased, which is attributed to reduced NC aggregation and PL quenching. We also varied the perovskite loading concentration in the nanocomposite and studied the resulting emission properties. The most intense PL emission was observed from the 2% perovskite-loaded disc, while the 10% loaded disc exhibited the highest radioluminescence (RL) emission from 50 kV X-rays. The strong RL yield may be attributed to the deep penetration of X-rays into the composite, combined with the large interaction cross-section of the X-rays with the high-Z atoms within the NCs. The nanocomposite disc shows an intense RL emission peak centered at 536 nm and a fast RL decay time of 29.4 ns. Further, we have demonstrated the X-ray imaging performance of a 10% CsPbBr 3 NC-loaded nanocomposite disc.