What is nano-scintillation long afterglow material? How did scientists find out?

For a long time, China has made a major breakthrough in importing advanced X-ray imaging equipment. The scientific team composed of Fuzhou University and National University of Singapore first discovered high-performance nano-scintillation long afterglow materials (axial luminescent materials) in the world, and developed a new flexible X-ray imaging technology. Long afterglow materials, which play an important role, refer to a luminous phenomenon (such as night pearl, etc.). ) can continue to emit light for several seconds or hours after the irritating light such as ultraviolet light, visible light and X-ray stops. It subverts the traditional X-ray technology and successfully solves the problems of three-dimensional imaging, oversized equipment and high cost. China has entered the advanced ranks in this field.

X-ray has been widely used in scientific research, medical and health care, safety inspection, industrial nondestructive testing and other important fields. With the birth and development of computed tomography, X-ray detection has become an indispensable technology in medical imaging. However, at present, high-end X-ray imaging equipment and main components are imported in large quantities in China, and medical imaging equipment, mask aligner and chips are listed as "35 technologies that block the neck" in China by Science and Technology Daily [2-3].

High-energy rays cannot be directly observed by naked eyes, so the most commonly used method in recent decades is to convert X-rays into visible light or electrical signals through detectors. Most X-ray flat panel detectors must integrate thin film transistor array (TFT), amorphous silicon photoelectric layer and flash lamp. Among them, the material that can convert high-energy light into visible light is called scintillator, which is the core part of X-ray detector. Researchers such as Professor Liang from Fuzhou University, Professor Chen Qiuxiu from the National University of Singapore and others published papers on Natural Explosion, and made a flexible X-ray plane detector using rare earth nanocrystals as scintillation materials, realizing high-resolution X-ray luminescence extended imaging.

Because of its high sensitivity and high aperture resolution, many kinds of luminous images with high contrast have attracted more and more attention in the application field of luminous images in vivo and in vitro. A variety of optical probes such as organic dyes, fluorescent proteins and inorganic quantum dots have been developed, and multiple fluorescence imaging has been realized. However, the fluorescence lifetime of these fluorescent probes is very extreme, so it is necessary to turn on the stimulation light while obtaining the fluorescence signal. Therefore, fluorescence imaging is strongly interfered by strong stimulus light and scattered light of background fluorescence, and it is difficult to obtain high contrast imaging results. In order to solve this problem, many studies focus on preparing optical probes with long fluorescence lifetime, but the fluorescence lifetime of existing fluorescent probes is generally very subtle, in the millisecond range. People need to use expensive precision shutter equipment and complex computer algorithm to realize the effective separation and time resolution of stimulated fluorescence signal and light-related noise.