Zero-Dimensional Luminescent Metal Halide Hybrids Enabling Bulk Transparent Medium as Large-Area X-Ray Scintillators

Scintillators are critical in medical imaging, non-destructive security screening, and space exploration applications. However, it still remains a challenge to achieve large-area and high-transparency scintillators by a low-cost and easy-to-implement way. Herein, a large transparent medium with a diameter over 10 cm is prepared via a facile melt-quenching strategy using a stoichiometric mixture of ethyltriphenylphosphonium bromide (ETPBr) and MnBr₂ as raw materials. Benefiting from the crystallization behavior of high-efficiency green-emitting (ETP)₂MnBr₄ nanocrystals hybridized with amorphous phase in the transparent wafer, the (ETP)₂MnBr₄-based transparent medium as a scintillator evidences a high transparency (over 80%, ranging from 500 to 800 nm), a high light yield of ≈35 000 ± 2000 photon per MeV, a low detection limit of 103 nGy S^–1, and a competitive spatial resolution of 13.4 lp mm^–1 for X-ray imaging. This work offers a distinctive simple and fast melt-quenching methodology to fabricate (ETP)₂MnBr₄ metal halide X-ray scintillator wafer with large-area and shape flexibility, excellent transparency, and high scintillation performance for the medical or industrial X-ray imaging application.