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Fast response and efficiency of plastic scintillators are degraded by the preferential population of slow triplet excited states in luminescence centres, such as in dye molecules. This issue can be solved by hot exciton manipulation, which avoids population of the lowest triplet state. If the electron relaxation pathways in plastic scintillators can be manipulated in this way, given their advantage of low manufacturing price, they could become serious competitors to inorganic scintillators.
Description
Singlet and triplet relaxation pathways in a plastic scintillator. Electron relaxation pathways in the singlet (S) and triplet (T) states of an organic molecule emission centre with marked pathway to achieve complete branching into the singlet S1 state followed by fast radiative de-excitation. Sn and Tn stand for the n-th single and triplet excited states, respectively, KT-S(S-S or T-T) are rate constants and DES-T energy difference between the states in the subscript.