Danger Dust

Traditional scintillators rely on rigid inorganic matrices with high-Z elements, whose mechanical inflexibility restricts applications in multiple scenarios.

Developing an efficient scintillator that combines inorganic properties with flexibility is a desirable yet highly challenging goal. We pioneered an inorganic metafabric scintillator paradigm through self-sustained slip system engineering, transforming brittle all-inorganic scintillation materials into ductile textile architectures, yielding intrinsically conformally flexible scintillators that adhere seamlessly to complex, curved surfaces.

The ultimate all-inorganic scintillator delivers near-unity quantum yield, with scintillation output more than 10 times higher than that of previous polymer matrix–based flexible scintillators.

Using these metafabric scintillators, a multimodal x-ray interactive wearable platform (X-Wear) was developed, and their applications in body-centered flexible detection and imaging, mobile health, visual radiation monitoring, and breathable radiation shielding were successfully demonstrated.

This work offers a previously undefined paradigm for a scintillator system design strategy that maintains the high performance of inorganic scintillators while adding the functionality of being conformally flexible and wearable of fabrics.