Demonstration of completely organic, optically clear radioluminescent light

A new type of radioluminescent light source has been demonstrated. This all-organic system consists of covalently bound tritium within a solid, optically clear polymeric matrix. The matrix contains a set of organic luminophores that capture excitation energy from beta decay and red shift the energy in a stepwise fashion, after which a chosen wavelength is emitted as fluorescence. Both blue and orange lights have been fabricated. Unlike currently available tritium gas tube lights or radioluminescent paints, the brightness of these new systems is, in principle, scalable because self-attenuation and absorption effects are minimized.