Speaker
Description
The future generation of radiation detectors is more and more demanding on timing performance for a wide range of applications, such as time of flight (TOF) techniques for PET cameras and particle identification in nuclear physics and high energy physics detectors, precise event time tagging in high luminosity accelerators and a number of photonic applications based on single photon detection.
There is a consensus for gathering Europe's multidisciplinary academic and industrial excellence around the ambitious challenge to develop a 10ps TOF PET scanner (TOFPET). The goal is to reduce the radiation dose (currently 5-25 mSv for whole-body PET/CT), scan time (currently > 10 minutes), and costs per patient (currently > 1000 € per scan), all by an order of magnitude, opening molecular imaging procedures to new categories of patients, including pediatric, neonatal and even prenatal examinations. Moreover such a time resolution will cause a paradigm shift in in-vivo molecular imaging, by enabling on-the-fly image formation and observation of bio-distribution and biochemistry in animals and patients, as well as an order-of-magnitude leap in molecular sensitivity and speed.
To achieve this goal it is essential to significantly improve the performance of each component of the detection chain: light production, light transport, photodetection, readout electronics.
This talk will concentrate on the light production and light transport. It will be shown that standard bulk scintillators are unlikely to achieve this very ambitious goal. On the other hand the introduction of a number of disruptive technologies, such as multifunctional heterostructures combining the high stopping power of well know scintillators with the ultrafast photon emission resulting from the 1D, 2D or 3D quantum confinement of the excitons in nanocrystals, as well as photonic crystals and photonic fibers, open the way to new radiation detector concepts with unprecedented performance.
