Synergistic strain engineering of perovskite single crystals for highly stable and sensitive X-ray detectors with low-bias imaging and monitoring
Jizhong Jiang, Min Xiong, Ke Fan, Chunxiong Bao, Deyu Xin, Zhengwei Pan, Linfeng Fei, Haitao Huang, Lang Zhou, Kai Yao, Xiaojia Zheng, Liang Shen, Feng Gao
Abstract
Abstract Although three-dimensional metal halide perovskite (ABX 3 ) single crystals are promising next-generation materials for radiation detection, state-of-the-art perovskite X-ray detectors include methylammonium as A-site cations, limiting the operational stability. Previous efforts to improve the stability using formamidinium–caesium-alloyed A-site cations usually sacrifice the detection performance because of high trap densities. Here we successfully solve this trade-off between stability and detection performance by synergistic composition engineering, where we include A-site alloys to decrease the trap density and B-site dopants to release the microstrain induced by A-site alloying. As such, we develop high-performance perovskite X-ray detectors with excellent stability. Our X-ray detectors exhibit high sensitivity of (2.6 ± 0.1) × 10 4 μC Gy air −1 cm −2 under 1 V cm −1 and ultralow limit of detection of 7.09 nGy air s −1 . In addition, they feature long-term operational stability over half a year and impressive thermal stability up to 125 °C. We further demonstrate the promise of our perovskite X-ray detectors for low-bias portable applications with high-quality X-ray imaging and monitoring prototypes.