An efficient Cu+-doped glass scintillators with anti-thermal-quenching luminescence for multi-scenario applications

In the fields of radiation detection and X-ray imaging, oil exploration poses more stringent and specific requirements for performance of scintillators. Scintillators have to be operated at temperature higher than 200 ℃, and sometimes they are used in high humidity environment. However, most of existing commercial scintillators, such as Bi₄Ge₃O₁₂ and CsI:Tl, exhibit inferior thermal stability, which hinders their application in complex environment. Meanwhile, the commercial WLED suffers from excessive blue emission, deficient cyan emission and insufficient red emission, resulting in a low color rendering index and potential damage to human eyes after long-term use. Developing luminescent materials that feature both efficient cyan emission and excellent thermal stability has become a key breakthrough for improving lighting quality.

Recently, a team of material scientists led by Hai Guo from Zhejiang Normal University, China first reported the efficient Cu⁺-doped glass scintillator with anti-thermal-quenching luminescence used for X-ray imaging and WLED. This work not only provides new insights into enhancing the performance of glass scintillators but also demonstrates their potential for multi-scenario applications.

The team published their work in Journal of Advanced Ceramics on June 13, 2025.

“In this report, we prepared Cu⁺-doped oxyfluoride glass by a low-cost melting-quenching method. The optimal sample has high transparency, ensuring effective light output during the scintillation process,” said Hai Guo, professor at Department of physics at Zhejiang Normal University (China), a senior expert whose research interests focus on the field of glass scintillators.

“Surprisingly, Cu⁺-doped glass exhibits highly efficient broadband blue-cyan emission because of its large Stokes shift. Besides, it has excellent thermal stability. However, further investigation of its scintillating performance is needed,” said Hai Guo.

The Cu⁺-doped glass shows excellent radiation stability and X-ray absorption capacity. More importantly, the X-ray excited luminescence (XEL) intensity reaches 311% of that of Bi₄Ge₃O₁₂. And it exhibits obvious anti-thermal-quenching luminescence. The XEL intensity at 423 K is 155% of that at 303 K. Through thermoluminescence analysis, this phenomenon was proved to result from the energy transfer from traps to Cu⁺ at high temperatures. “The outstanding luminescent efficiency and thermal stability of Cu⁺-doped glass prompted us to apply it to X-ray imaging,” said Hai Guo.

In application of X-ray imaging, the spatial resolution of glass scintillator reaches 24 lp/mm. Its comprehensive scintillating performance surpasses that of most reported scintillator materials. Most notably, imaging resolution of Cu⁺-doped glass scintillator reaches 24 lp/mm and 20 lp/mm in high-temperature X-ray imaging and underwater X-ray imaging, respectively. “These results fully verify the superiority of Cu⁺-doped glass scintillator in X-ray imaging for extreme scenarios.” said Hai Guo. Guo and his team also noticed the potential of Cu⁺-doped glass for WLED. In this regard, the full spectra WLED fabricated using Cu⁺-doped glass exhibits a high color rendering index of 96.1.

Other contributors include Guanlin He, Junyu Chen, Lianjie Li from Department of physics at Zhejiang Normal University (China).

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11974315).

About Author

Guo Hai, a professor at the Department of Physics, Zhejiang Normal University, mainly focuses on the research of new rare earth optical functional materials. He has published over 200 SCI-indexed papers as the first author or corresponding author in prestigious journals such as Adv. Mater., Adv. Funct. Mater., J. Adv. Ceram., Laser Photonics Rev., Adv. Opt. Mater., J. Eur. Ceram. Soc., Chem. Eng. J., Sens. Actuators B Chem., Ceram. Int., Opt. Lett., and Opt. Express, with over 8,000 citations and an H-index of 49. He has been listed on the "Global Top 2% Scientists List" for both career and annual rankings (2019-2024). He serves as an Associate Editor for J. Am. Ceram. Soc. from 2015 to the present.

About Journal of Advanced Ceramics

Journal of Advanced Ceramics (JAC) is an international academic journal that presents the state-of-the-art results of theoretical and experimental studies on the processing, structure, and properties of advanced ceramics and ceramic-based composites. JAC is Fully Open Access, monthly published by Tsinghua University Press, and exclusively available via SciOpen. JAC’s 2023 IF is 18.6, ranking in Top 1 (1/31, Q1) among all journals in “Materials Science, Ceramics” category, and its 2024 CiteScore is 25.9 (5/130) in Scopus database. ResearchGate homepage: https://www.researchgate.net/journal/Journal-of-Advanced-Ceramics-2227-8508