High-resolution X-ray imaging via spatially decoupled heavy-atom antennas in organic scintillators

Organic scintillators are promising for X-ray imaging due to low cost, sustainability, and tunable structures, but their commercial use is limited by poor understanding of charge transfer design for balancing light yield, decay, and bandwidth. Here, we propose a spatially decoupled heavy atom antenna strategy, integrating alkyl bromides into a hybridized local and charge-transfer scaffold to create a scintillator. This architecture leverages the moderate charge-transfer state to deliver an optimal combination of a short radiative lifetime (3.74 ns), a narrow radioluminescence bandwidth (56 nm), a large Stokes shift (110 nm) and a high photoluminescence quantum yield of 100%. As a result, this scintillator exhibits excellent radioluminescence properties, rendering it suitable for highly sensitive X-ray detections. In this work, we elucidate a general design principle for creating high-performance scintillators that meet the stringent multi-property demands of advanced X-ray imaging applications.