X-ray quantum imaging with metasurface scintillators

Objetivo

Understanding X-ray interactions with matter underpins medical imaging, non-destructive testing, and particle detection. Today’s systems overwhelmingly rely on scintillators that convert X-rays into visible light, but this process often discards timing, angular, spectral, and polarization information and enforces a trade-off between spatial resolution and absorption efficiency. New strategies are needed to break such limits and maximize information per photon while preserving high efficiency.

Building on the PI’s work in nanophotonic scintillators, meta-optic computational imaging, and quantum correlations, we propose XQMeta: X-ray quantum imaging with metasurface scintillators. Operating in the single-X-ray regime, we will use second-order correlations to reveal the 3D scintillation emission volume – the fundamental resolution kernel – and perform event-wise inference.

XQMeta integrates three platforms: (i) a quantum nanophotonic X-ray microscope (QNXM) that records single-photon arrival maps from bulk scintillators; (ii) TiO2 metasurfaces monolithically integrated on scintillators (e.g. YAG:Ce) to encode depth, angle, polarization, and spectrum into distinctive point-spread functions; and (iii) an end-to-end inverse-design framework that maximizes information encoded into the detected signal.

This co-designed hardware–software approach decouples spatial resolution from absorber thickness, enabling micron-scale localization with millimetre absorbers, and enhances energy estimation through depth-encoding.

If successful, XQMeta will establish metasurface-on-scintillator quantum imagers as a new detector class: photon-counting with near-diffraction-limited optical readout, lab-scale systems approaching fundamental limits in sensitivity and resolution, and information-optimal detectors discovered by inverse design. These advances promise sharper images and lower dose in medical imaging and powerful new tools for inspection and X-ray science.

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