Nanophotonic control of spatial information in scintillation detectors

Abstract

X-rays enable non-invasive imaging across medicine, security, materials science, and beyond, yet modern systems remain constrained by the need to resolve finer structures at lower radiation dose. Scintillators are the dominant materials for detecting X-rays, but face a longstanding compromise: thick scintillators absorb X-rays effectively, whereas optical photons generated throughout their volume spread before detection, degrading spatial information. Existing scintillator architectures largely try to preserve resolution by physically confining light using pixels, columnar crystals, or microstructured channels. Here, we show that high-resolution detection does not require the volumetric confinement of scintillation light. A metalens integrated directly with a bulk scintillator uses nanophotonic wavefront control to preferentially transfer high-spatial-frequency information from volumetrically generated scintillation light to the detector, while retaining the X-ray absorption of a thick scintillator. We experimentally recover fine spatial detail in X-ray images of inorganic and biological specimens. In a detector geometry relevant to computed tomography (CT), the experimentally validated model predicts a fivefold reduction in required X-ray dose and a 25-fold increase in resolution bandwidth relative to a state-of-the-art pixelated scintillator. These results establish wavefront engineering as a route to separating efficient X-ray absorption from optical image formation, with the potential for substantially higher-resolution, lower-dose CT.