Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 14, 2026

From Molecules to Materials: Engineering New Ionic Liquid Crystals Through Halogen Bonding
Published on: March 24, 2018
Color-tunable hot-exciton organic glassy supramolecular scintillators enabled by host-guest co-melting
Yuan-Ji Ye1, Xiang-Long Wei2, Xi Yang2
1College of Chemical Engineering, Fuzhou University Fuzhou 350116 P.R. China meijin_lin@fzu.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Organic glassy scintillators are promising for radiation detection owing to their low cost and facile processability. However, their performance is often constrained by insufficient X-ray absorption and scintillation quenching during vitrification from a single crystal to glass. Herein, we present a co-melting strategy that integrates a heavy-atom-containing fluorescent host (TPABr) with hot-exciton emitters (DTPA2F, TPE4Br and BTHDMF) to construct color-tunable organic glassy supramolecular scintillators. Notably, the TPABr-DTPA2F glass shows pronounced enhancements over pristine DTPA2F glass, including a ∼51% increase in Young's modulus and a ∼41% boost in radioluminescence intensity. These improvements arise from enhanced X-ray absorption and efficient host-guest energy transfer, ensuring high exciton utilization efficiency in co-melted glass. Besides, supramolecular interactions further provide a rigid microenvironment that suppresses nonradiative decay and stabilizes molecular packing, thereby maintaining high scintillation efficiency. The co-melted glass features an ultrafast lifetime of 1.69 ns and a relative light yield of 33 763 photons per MeV and can be processed into a >12 cm2 transparent scintillator screen via comelt-quenching. The resulting screen achieves 30.0 lp mm-1 static X-ray imaging resolution and eliminates afterglow artifacts in dynamic imaging of vascular models and small biological specimens, demonstrating potential applications for advanced X-ray imaging.

