Nanophotonics and quantum optics for X-ray imaging

Impact statement

X-ray imaging underpins a broad range of technologies, from medical diagnostics and non-destructive testing to materials science and particle detection. Most existing systems rely on scintillators that convert X-rays into visible light, but this conversion process typically discards valuable information, including timing, depth of interaction, emission angle, polarization, and photon statistics. As a result, current detectors face fundamental trade-offs between efficiency, spatial resolution, and energy resolution.

Our research aims to overcome these limitations by combining nanophotonics, quantum optics, and computational imaging to transform scintillators into information-rich X-ray detectors. Rather than relying solely on improved materials, we pursue a material-agnostic approach in which optical nanostructures—such as metasurfaces integrated directly on scintillators—shape, enhance, and encode scintillation light at the point of emission. By controlling the photonic environment, we can modify emission rates, wavefronts, and photon correlations, enabling the recovery of spatial, spectral, and temporal information on an event-by-event basis.

When operating in the single–X-ray regime, this approach can leverage concepts from quantum optics, including higher-order photon correlations and information-theoretic estimation, to probe the fundamental scintillation emission volume and approach ultimate limits in X-ray detection. Our long-term vision is to establish metasurface-enabled, quantum-optical scintillators as a new class of detectors, enabling sharper images, lower radiation dose, and new imaging modalities across medicine, science, and technology.

Research questions

• What are the fundamental limits of spatial, energy, and temporal resolution in scintillation-based X-ray imaging, and how can quantum-optical measurements access these limits?
• How can nanophotonic structures and metasurfaces be designed to shape scintillation emission, encoding depth, angle, polarization, and spectrum into measurable optical signatures?
• Can photon statistics and higher-order correlations of scintillation light be exploited to perform event-wise inference of X-ray interaction properties?
• How can end-to-end inverse design and computational imaging frameworks be used to co-optimize scintillators, nanophotonic structures, and reconstruction algorithms for maximal information extraction?
• Is it possible to break the conventional efficiency–resolution trade-off in X-ray imaging, enabling micron-scale localization with millimeter-thick absorbers and significantly reduced radiation dose?