Scintillators with aggregation-induced emission

THE BIGGER PICTURE Scintillators are crucial in healthcare, national defense, and environmental applications. However, like other optoelectronic materials, scintillators suffer from aggregation-caused quenching and show weakened luminescence in the aggregate state. This results in low photoluminescence quantum yields, reduced light yields, and poor imaging resolution, which hinder their development and application. The advancement of aggregate science, particularly with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) materials, effectively addresses the above issues. Through improvements in molecular design and construction strategies, scintillators can be endowed with AIE properties to enhance their performance and introduce new optoelectronic features. This development paves the way for high-performance, multifunctional scintillators. SUMMARY Scintillators are vital components in high-energy radiation detectors and are used in fields like high-energy physics, non-destructive testing, radiochemistry, and medical diagnostics. Scintillators with aggregation-induced emission (AIE), through rational molecular design and preparation techniques, can be endowed with such properties that effectively overcome the inherent defects of existing inorganic and/or organic scintillators, such as high costs and poor mechanical properties in inorganic types and low light yield and aggregation-caused quenching for organic kinds, thus affording novel optoelectronic properties, superior performance, and broader applications. This review classifies AIE scintillators from a molecular perspective, based on their luminescence mechanisms and construction strategies, into fluorescent scintillators, thermally activated delayed fluorescence scintillators, metal cluster scintillators, organic-inorganic hybrid scintillators, and metal-organic framework scintillators. This review starts with analyses of these building strategies and the structure-performance relationships and then describes the applications of AIE scintillators based on their molecular structures and optoelectronic properties.