Nanocomposite material shows near perfect performance

This is the claim of a team at KAUST in Saudi Arabia, which claims that its material’s energy transfer could bring efficiency gains in devices including LEDs, X-ray imaging scintillators, and solar cells.

During a medical imaging procedure, X-rays passing through the body are absorbed by a scintillator material, which converts X-rays into light for a digital camera type sensor to capture.

“To date, high-performance scintillators consist mainly of either ceramic that needs harsh and costly preparation conditions, or perovskite materials that have poor air and light stability and high toxicity,” said Jian-Xin Wang, a postdoc who led the work in the laboratory of Omar Mohammed.

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Organic scintillator materials have good processability and stability but low imaging resolution and detection sensitivity due to the low atomic weight - and so limited X-ray absorption - of their component atoms.

Mohammed and his colleagues are now said to have improved the X-ray capture of organic scintillators by combining them with a metal-organic framework (MOF), Zr-fcu-BADC-MOF, which incorporates high atomic weight zirconium within highly ordered structures.