Strongly reduced hysteresis scintillation luminescence in lanthanide doped fluoride nanoscintillators.

X-ray excited optical luminescence (XEOL) imaging shows great potential applications in security inspection and computed tomography. Lanthanide doped fluoride nanoscintillators (NSs) do not only exhibit advantages of simple synthetic procedures, tunable emissions and high environmental stability, but also show many new properties through constructing core/shell architectures. However, the strong hysteresis scintillation luminescence greatly restrict their practical applications. Herein, we verify that this hysteresis can be fully restricted by employing core/shell structure to inhibit the generation of Frenkel defects and incorporating Gd3+ ions to introduce extra energy migration process. As a result, upon continuous X-ray irradiation, the XEOL intensity of the LiYF 4 : 15Tb/25Gd@LiYF 4 core/shell NSs almost keeps unchanged. Our results provide important information for designing new NSs with greatly reduced hysteresis scintillation luminescence, which show promising applications in the field of stable X-ray imaging. [Display omitted] • Hysteresis scintillation is greatly restricted in the LiYF 4 : 15Tb/25Gd@LiYF 4 NSs. • Upon continuous X-ray irradiation, its XEOL intensity is only increased ∼1.6%. • The core/shell structure can inhibit the generation of Frenkel defects. • Incorporating Gd3+ ions can introduce extra energy migration process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]