Large-Area Photonic Bound State in the Continuum for Ultraviolet and
Deep-Blue Emission for Organic, Inorganic and Perovskite Scintillators
Abstract
Optimizing the emission properties of materials in ultraviolet and deep
blue (UV-DB) is interesting in development of new scintillator devices
for the detection of X-ray, γ-ray and radiation particles as those
materials can be strong candidates for high light yield and fast
scintillators. While their intrinsic material properties are already
well studied, photonic enhancement generated through optical confinement
could significantly improve their emission characteristics, however one
needs to overcome the problem of relatively low refractive indices
contrast resulting in poor confinement of UV-DB light. This motivates
the search for resonator structures built from readily accessible
materials that can boast strong confinement in this spectral regime.
Here, we present such a structure, leveraging bound states in the
continuum (BICs) to realize large-area confinement of UV-DB light with
ultra-high quality factors up to Q ∼107. These
ultra-high Q-factors in turn result in strong enhancements in light
emission via the Purcell effect. We demonstrate the operation of such a
design by simulating the mode shape, Q factor and emission behaviour in
organic, hybrid perovskite and III-V scintillating materials. By
tailoring the structure geometry, it can be robustly tuned to match the
emission characteristics of chosen materials. We start with considering
ideal infinite structure supporting perfect BIC and we extend our model
on finite sized structures and we discuss the limitations associated
with the self-absorption and thickness of the structure. Our findings
pave the way to cost-effective and efficient designs for scintillators
in the UV-DB regime (submitted to IEEE Transactions on Nuclear
Sciences).