Transparent hybrid metal halide glassy scintillators for tunable multicolor and high-resolution X-ray imaging

X-ray imaging is indispensable in medical diagnostics, security screening, and industrial non-destructive testing, where image clarity, detection sensitivity, and operational stability are largely determined by scintillators—the materials that convert high-energy X-rays into visible light. Conventional inorganic scintillators such as BGO and LuAG:Ce offer strong X-ray absorption and reliable radiation hardness, but they often require energy-intensive high-temperature fabrication and are limited by rigidity and poor large-area processability. Organic-inorganic hybrid metal halides have recently emerged as promising alternatives because of their tunable structures, efficient luminescence, and low-temperature processing.

However, a long-standing challenge remains in practical scintillator screen fabrication. Most hybrid metal halide scintillators are processed by dispersing crystalline powders or nanocrystals into polymer matrices. To ensure sufficient X-ray attenuation and brightness, these composite films must usually be hundreds of micrometers to millimeters thick. As thickness increases, particle aggregation, non-uniform crystal distribution, and polymer-crystal interfacial heterogeneity inevitably cause severe light scattering, which reduces transparency and blurs the final X-ray image. “Powder-polymer scintillator screens face an intrinsic trade-off between X-ray absorption and imaging resolution,” said Dr. Shilin Jin from Fujian Normal University. “Increasing thickness improves X-ray stopping power, but it also enhances light scattering. Our goal was to design a continuous and optically homogeneous scintillator medium that can maintain both strong absorption and high spatial resolution.”

To address this issue, the research team developed two transparent hybrid metal halide glass scintillators, MTP₂SbCl₅ and MTP₂MnCl₄, using a scalable low-temperature melt-quenching strategy. Instead of embedding crystalline particles into polymers, the team directly transformed the hybrid metal halides or their precursor mixtures into transparent glass bulks. During the process, the precursors were heated into a molten state and then rapidly quenched in preheated molds, producing glass scintillators with controllable shape and thickness.

Structural analysis revealed that both materials possess zero-dimensional organic-inorganic architectures, in which isolated [SbCl₅]²⁻ or [MnCl₄]²⁻ inorganic luminescent units are separated by bulky methyltriphenylphosphonium cations. Powder X-ray diffraction confirmed the amorphous nature of the glasses, while FTIR, XPS, EDS, and elemental mapping verified that the organic and inorganic components remained chemically intact and uniformly distributed after glass formation. The Sb-based glass showed visible–near-infrared transmittance up to approximately 90%, and both glasses exhibited good glass-forming ability, with T_g/T_m ratios of 0.68 and 0.70. Under X-ray excitation, the transparent glasses demonstrated strong scintillation performance. At a thickness of 1 mm, MTP₂SbCl₅ and MTP₂MnCl₄ glasses achieved X-ray attenuation efficiencies of 100% and 99.8%, respectively. Using commercial BGO as a reference, their light yields were estimated to be 5819 and 19232 photons MeV⁻¹. Benefiting from the amorphous and optically homogeneous glass matrix, which suppresses particle- and grain-boundary-induced scattering, the glasses achieved spatial resolutions of 18.8 and 22.5 lp mm⁻¹, nearly twice those of previously reported crystalline composite counterparts.

The team further verified the robustness of the glass scintillators through repeated and long-term tests. Both glasses showed negligible degradation after 72 consecutive X-ray on/off cycles. After continuous X-ray irradiation with a cumulative dose of 408.6 Gy, MTP₂SbCl₅ and MTP₂MnCl₄ retained 98% and 95% of their initial X-ray-excited luminescence intensities, respectively. In addition, the glasses could undergo reversible glass–crystal–glass conversion and low-temperature self-healing. Fractured glass pieces healed at 200 °C for 5 min preserved more than 98% of their original scintillation intensity without obvious spectral shift. Beyond high-resolution imaging, the material system also enables multicolor radiation visualization. By adjusting the mass ratio of Sb- and Mn-based glasses, the radioluminescence color could be continuously tuned from green to yellow and orange-red. The team further demonstrated large-area glass scintillator screens and visual radiation detection patterns whose brightness and color changed with X-ray dose rate.

The team published their work in Journal of Advanced Ceramics on May 6, 2026.

“This work establishes transparent hybrid metal halide glass as a new scintillator platform,” said Prof. Daqin Chen, who led the study. “The combination of low-temperature processing, high resolution, recyclability, self-healing, and color-tunable radiation response offers a promising route toward next-generation X-ray imaging and intuitive radiation detection technologies.”

Other contributors include Qixin Huang, Luyao Wei, Yuehua Chen, and Daqin Chen from the College of Physics and Energy, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Manipulation and New Energy Materials, Fujian Normal University; Huaixi Chen from the Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Science and Technology for Medicine of Ministry of Education, College of Photonic and Electronic Engineering, Fujian Normal University; and Lingwei Zeng from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan University of Science and Technology.

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52572155 and 52272141) and Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (2024J02014).

About Author

Daxin Chen is a professor and doctoral supervisor at Fujian Normal University. In 2008, he obtained a doctoral degree in condensed matter physics from the Fujian Institute of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2012, he was promoted to researcher with exceptional qualifications. From 2014 to 2018, he was a distinguished professor at Hangzhou Dianzi University. In 2018, he joined Fujian Normal University as a high-level introduced talent. His main research focus is on luminescent materials and their applications. He has been the principal investigator of key research projects, sub-projects, and various national natural science foundation projects. He has published over 200 SCI papers as the first or corresponding author in journals such as Chem. Soc. Rev., Sci. Adv, Adv. Mater, Adv. Funct. Mater, ACS Energy Lett, and JACS. His h-index is 84, and he has been included in the ESI highly cited list more than 30 times. He has also obtained more than 20 invention patents. Currently, he is a member of the Photonic Materials and Devices Professional Committee of the Chinese Academy of Materials, a member of the Special Glass Committee of the Chinese Ceramic Society, and an associate editor (Associate Editor) of the international journal J. Am. Ceram. Soc. and a member of the editorial board of the ceramic journal J. Adv. Ceram. (with an IF of 18.6). He has been selected for the annual and lifetime top 2% global scientists list jointly released by Stanford University and Elsevier for consecutive years from 2020 to 2023.

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 2024 IF is 16.6, ranking in Top 1 (1/34, 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