Abstract
Scintillators, materials that produce light pulses upon interaction with ionizing radiation, are widely employed in radiation detectors. In advanced medical-imaging technologies, fast scintillators enabling a time resolution of tens of picoseconds are required to achieve high-resolution imaging at the millimetre length scale. Here we demonstrate that composite materials based on fluorescent metal–organic framework (MOF) nanocrystals can work as fast scintillators. We present a prototype scintillator fabricated by embedding MOF nanocrystals in a polymer. The MOF comprises zirconium oxo-hydroxy clusters, high-Z linking nodes interacting with the ionizing radiation, arranged in an orderly fashion at a nanometric distance from 9,10-diphenylanthracene ligand emitters. Their incorporation in the framework enables fast sensitization of the ligand fluorescence, thus avoiding issues typically arising from the intimate mixing of complementary elements. This proof-of-concept prototype device shows an ultrafast scintillation rise time of ~50 ps, thus supporting the development of new scintillators based on engineered fluorescent MOF nanocrystals.
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The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
Financial support from the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR) through grant Dipartimenti di Eccellenza - 2017 ‘Materials for Energy’ is gratefully acknowledged. We acknowledge support from PRIN-20173L7W8K and PRIN-2015CTEBBA-003. We would like to thank I. Supino for her contribution to the synthesis. The work performed at CERN was made in the frame of Crystal Clear Collaboration.
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J.P., A.P. and A.C. designed and synthesized the MOF nanocrystals and fabricated the composites. J.P., S.B., P.E.S., C.X.B. and A.C. analysed the nanocrystals and composite structural properties. I.V., R.C. and A.V. performed the steady-state radioluminescence studies. C.D., M.S., N.K., S.G. and E.A. performed the scintillation experiments with pulsed X-ray sources. M.S., N.K., S.G. and E.A. performed the light-yield measurements. M.B. and L.G. performed the scintillation measurements with natural radioactive sources. E.C.P., F.M. and A.M. performed and supervised the photoluminescence studies. F.M. and A.M. developed the numerical modelling of the nanocomposite optical properties. A.M. conceived and designed the project.
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Supplementary Figs. 1–49, Tables 1–10, synthetic procedures, experimental methods, data and refs. 1–12.
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Perego, J., Villa, I., Pedrini, A. et al. Composite fast scintillators based on high-Z fluorescent metal–organic framework nanocrystals. Nat. Photonics 15, 393–400 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00769-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00769-z
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