A Universal Doping Strategy for Boosting Luminescence Efficiency of Blue-Emitting Hybrid Zn Halides as Ultrastable and Underwater Scintillators

Abstract

Underwater blue-emitting X-ray scintillator is important for the resource exploration and communication in deep sea, but remains a significant challenge for perovskites. Herein, we proposed a universal Pb²⁺-doping strategy toward a family of stable 0D Zn halide A_nZnBr₄ realizing highly efficient blue-emitting scintillation. First-principles calculations indicate that doped-Pb²⁺ introduced extremely narrow impurity bands, which prompt more carriers into conduction bands, leading to near-unity PLQY. Meanwhile, these halides can withstand complex aqueous solutions containing various chemical substances in wide pH range (1–14) demonstrating ultrahigh water-resistance stabilities. More significantly, these halides exhibit satisfactory scintillation and imaging performance with highest light yield (31,500 photons MeV⁻¹), low detection limit (141.2 nGy_air s⁻¹) and large spatial resolution (15.10 lp/mm), ranking among the top-performing Zn halide scintillators reported to date. The high water-resistance stabilities and satisfactory scintillation performance endow these halides advanced underwater X-ray imaging. This work not only provides a universal strategy to explore highly-efficient blue-emitting perovskite scintillators, but also realizes application of high-resolution X-ray imaging in underwater environment.