Porous composites based on scintillating metal-organic frameworks nanocrystals for radioactive gas detection.
Résumé
Radioactive gas monitoring is an important topic for homeland security, medical research and metrology. Our research aims at developing a new ultrasensitive detection system based on timecoincidence techniques exploiting porous scintillators, which enhance the interaction probability of emitted ionizing radiations and concentrate the radioactive material by absorption of gases. Considering their fast scintillation [1] and compositional tunability [2], here highly-porous fluorescent hafnium based metal-organic frameworks nanocrystals are included in a polystyrene aerogel matrix to obtain a hierarchical pore size distribution particularly favorable for gas absorption and realizing a prototype scintillating detector tested for sensing the 85Kr, 222Rn, and 3H radioactive gas species.