Sub-50 Picosecond exceptionally Bright Perovskite Scintillation by Unlocking Giant Oscillator Strength

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel perovskite scintillator achieving sub-50 picosecond emission with high brightness by leveraging giant oscillator strength and coherent radiative acceleration, surpassing current ultrafast scintillators.

Contribution

It introduces a strategy to unlock giant oscillator strength in CsPbCl3 nanocrystals, enabling ultrafast photon bursts and unprecedented timing resolution in scintillation detection.

Findings

Achieved a dominant scintillation lifetime of 13.11 ps.

High light yield of 21,851 photons per MeV.

Coincidence time resolution of 30.8 ps.

Abstract

Ultrafast scintillators are indispensable for precise timing in high-energy physics and medical diagnostics. Fundamentally constrained by the trade-off between emission rate and light yield, conventional scintillators remain kinetically trapped in the sub-nanosecond regime, failing to break 50-picosecond limit. Here, we demonstrate a strategy to bypass this limitation by harnessing the coherent radiative acceleration in weakly confined CsPbCl3 perovskite nanocrystals to generate an ultrafast photon burst. This effect originates from the giant oscillator strength, which we unlock by suppressing exciton-phonon scattering at mild cryogenic temperatures. Consequently, our scintillator achieves an unprecedented dominant lifetime of 13.11 ps alongside a high light yield of 21,851 ph/MeV. The resulting prompt photon emission rate more than 100 times higher than that of state-of-the-art ultrafast scintillators. We validate this breakthrough in realistic detection scenarios, achieving a coincidence time resolution of 30.8 ps and accurately resolving 13.5 ps electron bunches and 16.6 ps single-shot gamma-ray pulses. Our findings establish a robust coherent framework for next-generation ultrafast scintillators, pushing extreme radiation diagnostics into the picosecond frontier.