Research Projects

X-ray imaging remains a cornerstone of modern diagnostics, non-destructive evaluation, and industrial inspection. While traditional scintillation-based methods and flat-panel detectors have significantly advanced the field, persistent challenges including high radiation dose requirements, limited spatial resolution, inflexibility, and high fabrication costs highlight the pressing need for next-generation materials and device architectures. Present-day X-ray detectors are often rigid, expensive, and constrained by complex fabrication protocols. They rely heavily on bulk scintillators or high-temperature processed semiconductors that are incompatible with scalable, flexible electronics. To overcome these limitations, our project proposes a novel class of solution-processable, low-cost, and highly sensitive perovskite-based nanoelectronic devices for X-ray detection. Metal halide perovskites due to their high atomic number constituents, strong X-ray absorption coefficients, exceptional optoelectronic properties, and compatibility with low-temperature solution processing offer a transformative route for the development of next-generation X-ray imaging systems. Their intrinsic advantages also enable fabrication of large-area, flexible, and lightweight detectors suitable for wearable and portable applications. Objectives: 1. To synthesize and characterize high-performance, solution-processed perovskite materials optimized for X-ray absorption and charge transport. 2. To design and fabricate nanoelectronic devices (e.g., photoconductors, photodiodes, field-effect transistors) based on these perovskite materials tailored for direct X-ray detection. 3. To investigate the interaction of perovskite nanomaterials with varying X-ray energies and evaluate detector performance in terms of sensitivity, signal-to-noise ratio, spatial resolution, and response time. 4. To develop rigid/ flexible and low-dose X-ray imaging modules using perovskite-based architectures and assess their viability for real-time biomedical and industrial applications. 5. To understand the degradation mechanisms under continuous X-ray exposure and engineer material/ device stability accordingly. The central hypothesis is that perovskite materials with high-Z elements, when integrated into appropriately engineered nanoelectronic device architectures, will enable direct-conversion X-ray detectors that are simultaneously sensitive, low-cost, flexible, and scalable, outperforming existing technologies in terms of dose efficiency, flexibility, and manufacturing simplicity. On a scientific front, it will contribute to the material physics of perovskites and on a technological front, it focuses the development of X-ray detectors. This project will bridge material innovation with device engineering to realize a new generation of nanoelectronic X-ray detectors that are not only fundamentally insightful but also practically deployable across medical, industrial, and security domains.