Supercollimating photonic crystal scintillators

TL;DR

This paper introduces supercollimating photonic crystal scintillators that significantly enhance spatial resolution and dose efficiency in X-ray imaging by suppressing diffraction-induced light spreading.

Contribution

It proposes a novel class of 3D photonic crystal scintillators utilizing supercollimation to overcome traditional resolution and efficiency trade-offs.

Findings

Enhanced spatial resolution by up to tenfold compared to conventional scintillators.

Increased detector quantum efficiency at high spatial frequencies.

Achieved similar image quality with roughly ten times lower X-ray dose.

Abstract

Scintillators convert X-ray energy into visible or near-visible photons, enabling applications in high-energy particle detection and X-ray imaging. Increasing scintillator thickness improves X-ray absorption but degrades spatial resolution due to diffraction-induced lateral spreading of emitted light, resulting in a fundamental trade-off between detection efficiency and image resolution. Here, we propose a class of three-dimensional photonic crystal scintillators that overcomes this limitation through supercollimation, in which light propagates with suppressed diffraction. We develop a multiscale modeling framework that integrates nanophotonic band-structure simulations with Monte Carlo particle transport to quantitatively evaluate the performance of such scintillators. Our results show that supercollimating photonic crystal scintillators can enhance spatial resolution by up to an order of magnitude relative to conventional bulk scintillators of equal thickness. This improvement leads to a substantial increase in detector quantum efficiency (DQE), particularly at high spatial frequencies, enabling fine features to be preserved at reduced X-ray dose. We further demonstrate that comparable image quality can be achieved with approximately an order-of-magnitude lower X-ray dose. By directly engineering light transport within the bulk of the scintillator, this work establishes a nanophotonic route to simultaneously improving resolution and dose efficiency in X-ray imaging.