Toward Predictive Scintillation Science: Vision, Challenges, and Opportunities for Next-Generation Radiation Detection Materials

Scintillation is one of the most complex emergent phenomena in functional materials: energy deposited by ionizing radiation cascades across orders of magnitude in space and time before producing a detectable photon signal. Despite decades of progress, we still lack predictive capability for many key functional properties, including light yield, timing performance, nonproportionality, and energy resolution, because the underlying processes span femtosecond to millisecond timescales and Ångström to macroscopic length scales. These regimes remain difficult to probe experimentally and prohibitively expensive to describe fully with quantum methods.

In this talk, I will outline a vision for the next decade of scintillation research: how we can move from empirical discovery toward physics-based prediction and design. I will discuss recent advances in ultrafast characterization, transient absorption spectroscopy, and time-correlated single-photon counting that open new windows into excitation migration and quenching pathways. I will highlight physical constraints that fundamentally limit scintillator performance, identify opportunities which may break existing tradeoffs, and share examples from ongoing efforts to accelerate materials discovery through in-depth characterization. Together, these developments point toward a unified framework for predicting, characterizing, and engineering scintillation mechanisms, enabling the next generation of radiation detection materials for nuclear security, HEP, and medical imaging.