A few recent developments in nanophotonic scintillators

Recent developments at the intersection of nanophotonics and scintillator materials development have led to the conceptualization and demonstration of so-called “nanophotonic scintillators [1–4].” Nanophotonic scintillators consist of scintillator materials integrated into nanophotonic structures, patterned at the scale of their optical emission wavelength. Nanophotonic scintillators are a promising platform to control and enhance spontaneous light emission in scintillators. Mechanisms of light control and generation enhancement with nanophotonic scintillators include (1) angular light emission control and outcoupling enhancements with surface-patterned scintillators [1, 2]; and (2) enhancement of the rate of spontaneous emission by volumetric patterning, leveraging the Purcell effect [3, 4]. Each of these methods entail the development of dedicated nanofabrication methods to realize wavelength-scale patterns into scintillator materials. In this talk, I will review some recent theoretical and experimental developments in nanophotonic scintillators. I will first present a general theoretical framework to model scintillation in arbitrary nanophotonic structures, which also lends itself to shape optimization of nanophotonic structures for enhanced scintillation. Then, I will review some recent experimental demonstrations in surface-patterned photonic crystal scintillators and multilayer scintillators. Based on this framework and recent theoretical proposals, I will also present other nanophotonic scintillator designs for enhanced spatial resolution and efficiency, as well as software-hardware co-design of nanophotonic scintillators for enhanced x-ray imaging [5, 6].