The secret life of image plate phosphors

X‐ray imaging using storage phosphors is an increasingly popular method of taking data on synchrotron x‐ray stations. There are now commercially available scanners, which are being used at Daresbury and most other synchrotron light facilities worldwide. Although the basic principle behind the x‐ray stimulation and the subsequent readout of the phosphor has been known for a number of years, the details of the physical mechanisms have not been widely published and appear to be incompletely understood. Users of image plate systems might be surprised to learn of some of the observations made by the Daresbury Detector Development Group during the assessment of the storage phosphor technique as applied to x‐ray diffraction on the synchrotron. We present intriguing examples of yet unexplained phenomena which may need to be taken into account for experiments with very low experimental signal‐to‐noise ratios in their images. Possible future developments in image plate phosphors are also discussed.