High-Performance Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Lanthanide Halide Glass Scintillators Enabled by Dehydration for Efficient...

Although glass scintillators hold great promise for high-resolution X-ray imaging, the practical application is often limited by thermodynamic instability, leading to uncontrolled glass-to-crystal transformations that degrade imaging resolution. Herein, a novel strategy is presented to synthesize (methyl(triphenyl)phosphonium)₃EuCl₆ ((MTP)₃EuCl₆) glass scintillators through the dehydration of their crystalline precursors. The findings reveal that the dehydration process significantly enhances the stability of the glass scintillators by confining the constituent ions within a rigid, highly viscous matrix. This confinement effectively restricts ion mobility and prevents the reorganization required for crystal nucleation. Moreover, the dehydration reduces the trapping of in situ generated charge carriers and increases the photoluminescence quantum yield, leading to enhanced radioluminescence performance. The resulting (MTP)₃EuCl₆ glass scintillators demonstrate an X-ray detection limit as low as 95.8 nGy_air s⁻¹ and achieve a spatial imaging resolution of 14.3 lp mm^-1 at a dose rate of 5 mGy_air s⁻¹. This work provides valuable insights into designing glass scintillators that integrate long-term thermodynamic stability with optimized scintillation performance, offering significant potential for advanced X-ray imaging applications.