In 2006 the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory began the development of the High Energy X-ray Imaging Technology (HEXITEC) detector system. Over the subsequent decade the system has delivered exceptional spectroscopic performance of < 1 keV for hard X-ray energies (2 - 200 keV) using Cd(Zn)Te sensors. With a frame rate of 10 kHz the current system is able to deliver this spectroscopic...
The Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector (AGIPD), a megahertz frame-rate, high-dynamic range integrating pixel detector, was developed for photon science experiments at the European X-Ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) and tailored to its unique specifications. Two 1-Megapixel AGIPD detector systems have been installed at the European XFEL and are producing numerous scientific...
We developed a highly integrated particle telescope assembled from two Timepix3 ASIC chip detectors [1] operated and readout in sync with highly integrated MiniPIX readout interfaces. The pixel detectors are used as particle trackers stacked on top of each other (see Fig. 1a) being accommodated in close geometry. The small distance gap (about 10 mm) between the pixel detectors provides a wide...
JUNGFRAU is a charge integrating hybrid pixel detector developed for use at X-ray free electron lasers. With in pixel gain switching it provides single photon sensitivity down to 2 keV while maintaining a dynamic range of 120 MeV. The pixel size is 75 x 75 $\mu m^2$ and the largest detector currently in use has 16M pixels. The characteristics of Jungfrau makes it an interesting detector for...
Timepix2 [1] is a hybrid pixel detector developed in the Medipix2 collaboration as the successor of Timepix. It separates the sensor attached to the ASIC into a square matrix of 256 x 256 pixels at a pixel pitch of 55 µm. Similar to Timepix [2], it relies on a frame-based readout scheme. However, it comes with valuable additional features such as an occupancy trigger allowing to force the...
X-ray Edge Illumination X-ray phase contrast imaging techniques are presented with an overview of the basic principles and applications. A more in-depth discussion is dedicated to two examples where these techniques were tested outside of the laboratory to provide solution in security and in the medical field.
The effect of quantum entanglement was first discussed more than 80 years ago [1,2]. Particles that are quantum entangled are described by a common wavefunction which leads to enhanced correlations between the particle interactions, even when separated over macroscopic distances. The two photons resulting from positron annihilation are predicted to be in such an entangled state. Their...
In Particle Therapy (PT), nuclear interactions of the beam with the patient’s body causes fragmentation of both the projectile and target nuclei. In treatments with protons, target fragmentation generates short range secondary particles along the beam path, that may deposit a non-negligible dose especially in the entry channel. On the other hand, in treatments with heavy ions, such as C or...
Thermal Neutron Imaging is a steadily expanding area of imaging technology and techniques with increasing interest from applications such as cultural heritage, palaeontology, and metallurgy [1,2]. Increased demand for access combined with a limited number of suitable beamlines requires efficient use of available beamtime [3,4]. N-Cam is a new experimental neutron camera system designed with...
During Run 3 the LHC will deliver instantaneous luminosities of 510^34 cm^-2 s^-1 or even 710^34 cm^-2 s^-1. To cope with the high background rates and to improve the trigger capabilities in the forward region, the muon system of the CMS experiment has been upgraded with a new station of detectors based on triple-GEM technology, named GE1/1. The station, which has been installed in 2020,...
Modern vertex detectors are based on cylindrical or planar layers of silicon sensors, generally immersed in a magnetic field. These detectors are used for precision measurements of the particles produced in the interactions and, in particular, of the dacay products of those with a long mean life, such as open charm and beauty. Since the tracking layers are always few to tens of cm from the...
The “muon-to-electron conversion” (Mu2e) experiment at Fermilab will search for the Charged Lepton Flavour Violating neutrino-less coherent conversion -N(A,Z) e-N(A,Z) of a negative muon into an electron in the field of an aluminum nucleus. The observation of this process would be the unambiguous evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. Mu2e detectors comprise a straw-tracker, an...
Muography is a penetrating imaging technique making use of the natural cosmic muons to probe the inside density distributions of objects. Since the pioneering work from Luis Alvarez in the 1960s, different imaging modes have been implemented depending on the size of these objects. The most common and only usable one for very large structures is the so-called transmission muography, where the...
Mount Etna Volcano is characterized by the Summit Craters system which represents the crucial point of its persistent tectonic activity. The Muography of Etna Volcano project started in 2016 and the first muon-tracking telescope prototype has been installed on the slope of North-East Crater from August 2017 to October 2019 (Figure 1). The aim of the project was to find anomalies in the density...
In order to keep down costs and control yields, large area hybrid detectors are commonly implemented using multiple sensor tiles in various geometries. Due to the presence of guard rings, readout connections and other design considerations it is practically impossible to make tiled sensor arrays where the tiles meet up exactly. Even in the case of four side buttable sensors, arrays will still...
STFC’s developed 1M Large Pixel Detector (LPD) [1] is now in operation on the femtosecond experiment (FXE) instrument [2] at the EuXFEL. LPD consists of more than 1 million pixels split across 2048 ASICs, with each ASIC having dimensions 32 × 16 pixels and a pixel pitch of 500m. LPD’s three parallel gain stages provide a large dynamic range, capable of detecting 105 photon/pixel/12keV x-ray...
In the field of astronomy, photon counting detectors based on micro-channel plates (MCP) are commonly used for UV detection and their characteristics often limit the overall instrument performance. In particular, UV spectroscopy is adopted in solar physics and for the investigation of planetary exospheres. The PLUS (PLanet extreme Ultraviolet Spectrometer) Project aims at developing a...
Photon science with extended ultra violet (EUV) to soft X-ray photons generated by state of the art synchrotrons and FEL sources imposes an urgent need for suitable photon imaging detectors. Besides a high quantum efficiency, requirements on such EUV detectors include high frame rates, very large dynamic range, single-photon sensitivity with low probability of false positives, small pixel...
This paper presents a readout integrated circuit (IC) of pixel architecture called MPIX (Multithreshold Pixels), designed for CdTe pixel detectors used in X-ray imaging applications. The MPIX IC of the area of 9.6 mm x 20.3 mm is designed in a CMOS 130 nm process. The IC core is a matrix of 96 x 192 square-shaped pixels of 100 µm pitch. Each pixel contains a fast analog front-end followed by...
Jan Dudak1,*, Jan Zemlicka1
1 Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Husova 240/5,
110 00 Prague, Czech Republic
*Corresponding author: jan.dudak@cvut.cz
X-ray micro-CT has become a popular widely used tool for purposes of scientific research. Although the current state-of-the-art micro-CT technology is on a high technology level it...
The PERCIVAL detector is a CMOS imager specifically designed for the soft X-ray regime. In 2020, although still in a development phase, it served its two first user experiments, at a Storage Ring (SR) and also at a Free Electron Laser (FEL). We will report some preliminary results and sketch future plans.
With its 2 Megapixels, 27 µm pixel size, and 4 x 4 cm2 active area (extendable to 8 x 8...
The LCLS-II accelerator will provide pulses with a repetition rate of up to 1 MHz. To cope with the increase in repetition rate, a new family of detectors named SparkPix is being developed at SLAC.
SparkPix-ED is the first detector based on the Event-Driven information extraction engine, which combines high-frame rates and a triggering capability. Coarse X-ray images are streamed out at 1...
ePixM is a charge-integrating pixel detector which is being developed for soft X-rays experiments at LCLS-II. To enable single-photon detection with photon energies down to 250 eV, a monolithic active pixel sensor has been designed on a CMOS 150 nm process with a high-resistivity substrate [1]. The sensor is fully depleted, so charges are collected by drift. The back-side of the wafers has...
Recent advances in artificial intelligence, compact computing hardware, and
CMOS imaging sensors motivate physics-informed cameras (PhI-Cam). Here different
physics-driven information can come from device-specific sensor materials, sensor
architecture, electronics and noise, environmental parameters including illumination, and
degradation of the hardware performance over time. Given enough...
The Large Hadron Collider Beauty detector is a flavour physics detector, designed to detect decays of b- and c-hadrons for the study of CP violation and rare decays. At the end of Run-II, many of the LHCb measurements will remain statistically dominated. In order to increase the trigger yield for purely hadronic channels, the hardware trigger will be removed and the detector will be read out...
The ATLAS tracking system will be replaced by an all-silicon detector for the HL-LHC upgrade around 2025. The innermost five layers of the detector system will be pixel detector layers which will be most challenging in terms of radiation hardness, data rate and readout speed. A serial power scheme will be used for to reduce the radiation length and power consumption in cables. To handle the...
The response of a Timepix3 [1] (256 x 256 pixels, pixel pitch 55 $\mu$m) detector with a 500 $\mu$m thick HR GaAs:Cr [2] sensor was studied with proton beams at the Danish Centre for Particle Therapy in Aarhus, Denmark. The detector was irradiated at different angles with protons of 125, 171 and 219 MeV. The readout chip was configured to operate in electron or hole collection modes....
In contrast to silicon-based sensors, high-Z sensors materials like GaAs or Cd(Zn)Te provide a good quantum efficiency for the detection of hard X-rays above 15 keV. However, high-Z sensors require a careful characterization to better understand their performance since they typically suffer from crystal inhomogeneities, charge-trapping (leading to the so-called polarization effect) and high...
Thanks to a new emerging technology, diamond devices with 3-dimensional structures are produced using laser pulses to create graphitic paths in the diamond bulk. The fabrication of very narrow and close by columnar electrodes perpendicular to the detector surface allows the employment of a lower bias voltage at which the saturation charge velocity is reached and faster detector response, due...
X-ray ptychography is a scanning coherent diffraction imaging technique that is capable of obtaining quantitative electron density maps at the nanoscale. The technique has been proven to achieve resolutions beyond the limitations of conventional x-ray optics and has been applied to a wide range of scientific fields: from life science to environmental science, and magnetism. Until now the...
The Timepix (TPX) is a micropixelated imaging detector capable of recording both the arrival time and position of individual ions. In this study, we have integrated TPX detectors to three different mass spectrometers (MS) for the spatially resolved detection and structural analysis of macromolecular assemblies (MMAs). First, a dual microchannel plate (MCP) stack-TPX quad detection assembly has...
The LUXE experiment aims at studying high-field QED in electron-laser and photonlaser interactions, with the 16.5 GeV electron beam of the European XFEL and a laser beam with power of up to 350 TW. The experiment will measure the spectra of electrons and photons in non-linear Compton scattering where production rates in excess of 10^9 are expected per 1 Hz bunch crossing. At the same time...
In this article we present an 8-bit differential Successive Approximation Register (SAR) Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC), designed and manufactured in 28 nm CMOS process.
Radiation imaging is an essential part of medical diagnostics. Although integrating detectors are still widely used, more and more medical institutes have already switched to single photon counting (SPC) devices. The...
After more than 12 years of users operation, the MYTHEN II single photon counting microstrip detector has been upgraded in order to cope with progresses in the detector and data acquisition technology. MYTHEN III presents the same geometry as its predecessor (50 μm pitch 8 mm long strips, 6.4 mm wide modules), but it provides an enhanced performance.
In particular, a new readout chip has been...
Space radiation poses a threat not only to human space flight missions, but also to the electronic equipment of any space mission. Some dramatic space system failures and disturbances in recent years have been assumed to be radiation-induced malfunction of critical electronics parts. The space radiation environment consist of a variety of particle species, including electrons, protons and...
The most advanced particle trackers for space experiments all rely on micro-strip silicon sensors, readout with custom ASICs including amplification and shaping stages. This technology proved to be efficient, robust and fully compliant with space requirements. Both in its single- and the double-sided versions, microstrips allowed for important experiments like Pamela, AGILE, Fermi, AMS-02 and...
Operation of detectors at free-electron laser (FEL) facilities with sources providing high brilliance, high repetition rate and ultra-short X-ray pulses poses high risk of radiation damage to detector components exposed to X-ray radiation, e.g. the sensor and the readout Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). Knowledge about radiation-induced damage is important for understanding its...
The ARCADIA collaboration is developing Fully-Depleted Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (FD-MAPS) with an innovative sensor design in a 110nm CMOS process. This technology provides efficient charge collection and fast timing over a wide range of operational and environmental conditions [1]. The design targets very low power consumption, of the order of 20mWcm at 100MHzcm hit flux, to enable...
In this work the results of Technology-CAD (TCAD) device-level simulations of non-irradiated and irradiated Low-Gain Avalanche Diode (LGAD) detectors will be presented, aiming at evaluating the effects of layout and technological parameters on the device performance. LGADs are becoming one of the most promising devices for high performance in harsh operating environment thanks to the...
LHCb has recently submitted a physics case for a an Upgrade II detector to begin operation in 2031. The upcoming upgrade stage is designed to run at instantaneous luminosities of 2$\times 10^{34} cm^{-2}s^{-1}$, an order of magnitude above Upgrade I, and accumulate a sample of more than 300 fb$^{-1}$. At this intensity, the mean number of interactions per crossing would be 56, producing...
Due to the advantages in density, bandwidth and radiation performance of VCSEL-based array optical transmission system, it has been prevailingly researched and used for the front-end data acquisition in high-energy physics experiments [1]. This paper presents the design and the test results of a 25 Gbps VCSEL driving ASIC fabricated in 55 nm CMOS technology as a continuous development of the...
The serializer ASIC is used to convert parallel data into a higher bit rate serial data stream, which is widely used in high-speed serial communication systems and becomes one of the key functional modules in the serial data transmission system.This paper presents the design and the test results of a low-power 5Gbps 10:1serializer chip based on standard 130nm CMOS technology.
The chip...
The number of applications and technical implementations of X-ray phase-contrast imaging (XPCi) has continuously increased over the last two decades. As imaging detectors are insensitive to the phase of X-ray waves, various techniques were developed to transform sample-induced phase modulations into intensity modulations on the detector. For all these XPCi techniques the image formation...
Particle therapy is an established method to treat deep-seated tumours using accelerator-produced ion beams. For treatment planning, the precise knowledge of the stopping power (SP) within the patient is vital. Currently, SP values are extrapolated from X-ray CT, thus introducing conversion errors, eventually leading to uncertainties in the applied dose distribution. Using a proton computed...
Neutron detectors are an essential tool for the development of many research fields, as nuclear, particle and astroparticle physics as well as radiotherapy and radiation protection. Since neutrons cannot directly ionize, their detection is only possible via nuclear reactions with nuclei constituting the matter. In particular, the study of fast neutrons is often based on the neutron-proton...
Xenon scintillation has been widely used in recent particle physics experiments [1-3]. However, information on primary scintillation yield in the absence of recombination is still scarce and dispersed. The mean energy required to produce a VUV scintillation photon (Wsc) in gaseous Xe has been measured in the range of 30-120 eV [4-7]. Lower Wsc-values are often reported for alpha particles...
We report on manufacturing and testing of AC-coupled n-in-p pixel sensors for the usage in high luminosity environments. The detectors are produced at Micronova, Finland's national research infrastructure for micro- and nanotechnology, on magnetic Czochralski (MCz) p-type silicon wafers.
High leakage current caused by radiation damage in silicon is a significant source of noise in the...
Many international low-background experiments are showing increasing interest in the use of different plastic scintillation detectors. Based on our experience in the field of quality improvement of the polystyrene (PS) based plastic scintillation detectors [1,2], this work is focusing on a further enhancement of the scintillator light output and the associated energy resolution crucial for the...
To handle the increasing number of cancer patients, China has built its carbon ion therapy facility, in which the beam monitoring system ensures the beam energy deposition can accurately cover the dedicated tumor region. The full image of the beam energy deposition is needed for accurate beam calibration, thus a Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS), which can provide the energy deposition in...
In muon scattering tomography, the target materials are distinguished in accordance with the scattering angle through the process chain followed by the incoming muons within the investigated volume, and this scattering angle mainly depends on the atomic number, the density, and the thickness of the medium at a given energy value. The distinct values obtained for the scattering angle at...
For the acquisition of the alpha particle distribution, two-dimensional photodetectors combined with a scintillator plate have been developed over the past years. The individual energies of the alpha-emitting radionuclides should be identified for the quantitative analysis. This can be done by the spectrometric method after energy and efficiency calibrations. In order to calibrate energy and...
The start of the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) in 2027 requires upgrades to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment. In the scope of the upgrade program the complete silicon tracking detector will be replaced until 2026. The new CMS tracker will be equipped with silicon pixel detectors in the inner layers closest to the interaction point and silicon strip detectors in the outer layers...
The BLEMAB project (BLast furnace stack density Estimation through on-line Muon ABsorption measurements) [1], evolution of the previous Mu-Blast project [2], will investigate in detail the capability of muon radiography techniques, applied to the imaging a blast furnace inner zone. In particular, the geometry and size of the so called “cohesive zone”, i.e. the spatial zone where the slowly...
Carbon-ion therapy is a form of external-beam radiotherapy used for highly precise cancer treatment. The characteristic depth-dose deposition curve of carbon ions exhibits a large dose gradient at the end of the beam range, the so-called Bragg peak. The position of the Bragg peak in the tumour is sensitive to anatomical changes such as tumour shrinkage or cavity filling. Therefore, the...
Inorganic scintillators contain lutetium such as lutetium oxyorthosilicate (LSO), lutetium yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO) widely used today in nuclear medicine and other fields because of their convenient physical properties of high detection efficiency, fast decay time, and high light yield. Despite its advantages, lutetium-based scintillators issue in single transmission measurement, low...
Hybrid pixel detectors- Timepix are multi-parameter detectors that gives simultaneously information about the position, energy, and time of arrival of a particle hitting the detector. These types of multi-parameter detectors can be effectively used to study and/or reinvestigate some fission processes such as the rare fission modes (ternary, quaternary, quinary), which are planned. In the rare...
3D pixel sensors are the technology of choice for the innermost layer (L0) of the ATLAS ITk detector at High Luminosity LHC. The considered sensors have pixel size of either 25 µm 100 µm (25100) or 50 µm 50 µm (5050), with one read-out electrode at the centre of a pixel and four bias electrodes at the corners. The former geometry has been chosen for the central part of L0 (barrel), the...
Characterization of primary and stray radiation produced in FLASH electron beams with Flex chip-assembly TimePIX3 pixel detectors
C. Bălan*,1, C. Oancea2, J. Pivec2, C. Granja2, J. Jakubek2, D. Chvatil3, V. Olsansky,3 V. Chiș1
- Faculty of Physics, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
- ADVACAM, Prague, Czech Republic
- Nuclear Physics Institute, Czech Academy of...
The Muon Drift Tube (MDT) chambers provide very precise and reliable muon tracking and momentum measurement in the ATLAS muon spectrometer. Already in Run 2 of the LHC they have to cope with very high background counting rates up to $500 Hz/cm^2$ in the inner endcap layers. At High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), the background rates are expected to increase by almost a factor of 10. New small (15...
Small-pitch, thin 3D Si sensors have been developed for the ATLAS and CMS experiment upgrades at the High-Luminosity (HL) LHC. The pixel sizes are 50$\times$50 $\mu$m$^2$ with 1 readout column, and 25$\times$100 $\mu$m$^2$ with 1 or 2 readout columns (1E and 2E). Owing to the small inter-electrode distance, ranging from ~28 $\mu$m to ~51 $\mu$m in the considered layouts, these devices are...
Abstract:
The Sodium Iodide with Active Background REjection (SABRE South) detector experiment (Figure 1) in Australia aims to direct dark matter detection, and its detector design includes numerous materials that will be in contact with the liquid scintillator over the uninterrupted multi-year operation for around 5 years [1, 2]. The light yield of the liquid scintillator is easily...
This study describes the design and construction of a Chemical Vapor Deposit (CVD) diamond detector used to detect neutron radiations. The use of a neutron detector in a thin CVD diamond film has many benefits, including radiation hardening, fissile-material free, low gamma susceptibility, compact and solid state, spectroscopic, both thermal and quick neutron detection, especially when...
The muon campus program at Fermilab includes the Mu2e experiment that will search for a charged-lepton flavor violating processes where a negative muon converts into an electron in the field of an aluminum nucleus, improving by four orders of magnitude the search sensitivity reached so far.
Mu2e’s Trigger and Data Acquisition System (TDAQ) uses {\it otsdaq} as its solution. Developed at...
In nowadays, digital X-ray imaging sensors with indirect detection type have been widely used in many medical imaging applications. These conventional indirect X-ray imaging detectors are based on the combination of a thin-film transistor (TFT) panel with different scintillating screens such as CsI, GOS materials. However, the digital radiography system using TFT-based X-ray imaging detectors...
A new detector concept has been developed for a positron emission tomography (PET). This concept is similar to the one used for JPET [1], but there are some conceptual differences. The design of the gantry and the Monte Carlo Simulations are in progress. The basic idea is the axial orientation of the scintillators which are widely used in PET; namely LYSO (Lutetium–yttrium oxyorthosilicate)....
In this work, we present models to simulate two performance parameters for silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) in Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology: Photon Detection Probability (PDP) and Dark Count Rate (DCR). These models were developed to comply with the specifications of SiPM which is applicable to scintillation detectors. These two characteristics are important...
Introduction: Carbon-ion radiation therapy offers several advantages to treat deep-seated tumors compared to other radiation therapy with photons or protons. The focused depth dose deposition of carbon ions allows to cover with high doses the full tumor volume while minimizing the dose deposited in surrounding healthy tissues. However, this also leads to a higher sensitivity to anatomical...
The fast timing MPGD (FTM) is a result of an ongoing effort for developing an MPGD with a time resolution under one nanosecond, while maintaining the excellent rate capability (tens of MHz/cm2) and the good space resolution (150 µm) of the present-generation micro-pattern gaseous detectors, whose reliability has been demonstrated at present colliders and ongoing upgrades of LHC experiments....
To build a new CMS Phase II tracker system [1] in the framework of High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), more than ten thousand silicon strip modules have to be produced and tested. The Belgium production center at the IIHE, contributing to this collective task, has decided to build about 2000 dual silicon strip modules for one endcap of the outer silicon tracker. Integration centers in UCL (Belgium)...
K-Edge Subtraction (KES) imaging allows to quantify the presence of one or more contrast agents embedded within a matrix material, and it can be applied both in planar and tomographic configurations. KES signal derives from the sharp rise in the attenuation coefficient corresponding to the binding energy of the contrast element K-shell electrons. In its simplest formulation, KES consists in...
As the leading research platform of heavy-ion science in China, the heavy-ion physics and heavy-ion applications at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL) drives the development of new detector technology. Thus, a Monolith Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) is has been designed in a 130nm CMOS process.
The pixels can record the energy, time, and position of the hit particles. To be tuned...
The development of CMOS pixel detector technology provides an unprecedented signal-to-noise ratio, spatial resolution, material budget, and readout speed for vertex and tracking detectors in particle experiments [1]. The commonly used CMOS pixel detector is the Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS), which collects the charge deposited by the particles that pass through the detector.
The...
The GBTX ASIC is a standard solution for providing fast control and data readout for radiation detectors used in HEP experiments [1,2]. However, it is subject to export control restrictions due to the usage of radiation-hard technology. To enable the development of GBT-based readout chains in countries, where the original GBTX can’t be imported, an FPGA-based GBTX emulator (GBTxEMU) has been...
HEXITEC is a spectroscopic imaging x-ray detector technology developed at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for high energy x-ray and gamma ray applications. Each module has 80x80 pixels on a 250µm pixel pitch, and has been implemented successfully in a number of applications [1]. This paper presents the HEXITEC 2x2 detector system, a tiled array of 4 HEXITEC modules in a 2x2 formation,...
We examined the application of proton imaging [1] on thin samples at the proton and light-ion Tandetron accelerator [2] of the NPI-CAS in Rez near Prague. We make use of high-sensitivity hybrid semiconductor pixel detectors Medipix/Timepix equipped with integrated per-pixel signal processing electronics. We use the Timepix3 ASIC chip [3] equipped with a 500 µm Si sensor operated with the fast...
The Electromagnetic Calorimeter (ECAL) of the CMS detector has played an important role in the physics program of the experiment, delivering outstanding performance throughout data taking. The High-Luminosity LHC will pose new challenges. The four to five-fold increase of the number of interactions per bunch crossing will require superior time resolution and noise rejection capabilities. For...
Timepix3 pixel detectors [1] have shown potential to contribute to a variety of fields. In particle tracking, their improved time and energy resolution, (1.56 ns and 2 keV at 60 keV, respectively) permits precise vertex determination and particle identification via stopping power [2]. Following previous studies of their 3D reconstruction capabilities [3,4], the presented work provides a...
In the presented work, the parameters of the new MAPD-3NM-II photodiode with the buried pixel structure manufactured by Zecotek Ph. were investigated. The following physical and electrical parameters were studied; current-voltage and capacitance-voltage characteristics, dark count rate, photon detection efficiency, gain, the temperature coefficient of breakdown voltage, breakdown voltage, and...
We developed a Large-Area SiPM Pixels (LASiP) to use it in Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT).
We present our results of a proof-of concept camera made of 4 LaSiPs prototypes, as well as simulations of the system to study the contribution of different types of LaSiP noise on the energy resolution and the impact of the pixel size, the pixel geometry and the noise on the...
High speed and radiation tolerant optical link has been prevailing used between the front-end detector and the back-end data acquisition in the high-energy physics experiments. The optical transceiver (driver/receiver) ASIC is the key component within the optical data transceiver systems. This paper presents the design and test results of an optical transceiver ASIC fabricated in 55 nm CMOS...
Hybrid pixel radiation detectors working in single-photon counting mode have gained increasing attention due to their noiseless imaging and high dynamic range. Due to the fact that sensors of different materials can be attached to the readout circuit, they allow operation with a wide range of photon energies. The performance of the single photon counting detectors is limited by pile-up. To...
Digital tomosynthesis (DTS) based on filtered-backprojection (FBP) reconstruction requires a full field-of-view (FOV) scan and relatively dense projections, which results in high dose for medical imaging purposes. To overcome these difficulties, we investigated region-of-interest (ROI) DTS or interior DTS reconstruction where the x-ray beam span covers only a small ROI containing a target...
The Medipix3, a hybrid pixel detector with a silicon sensor, has been evaluated as a beam instrumentation device with proton and carbon ion measurements at EBG GmbH MedAustron IR1 (Irradiation Room 1), Marie-Curie-Straße 5, 2700 Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Protons energies are varied from 62.4 to 800 MeV with 10^4 to 10^8 protons per second impinging on the detector surface. For carbon ions,...
In the last years, new solutions in both hardware and software have resulted in significant improvements in effective sensitivity in Positron Emission Tomography (PET). This improvement is mainly achieved by increasing the thickness of the gamma detectors (reducing time and spatial resolution), increasing the number of detector rings (increasing the economic cost) or developing gamma detectors...
We present a method for material classifications in spectral X-ray Computed Tomography (SCT) using energy-resolved, photon-counting detectors (PCD), with which one can simultaneously measure the energy dependence of a linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) of a material. The method uses a basis material decomposition taking advantage of the spectral LACs to estimate effective atomic number...
In HL-LHC operation the instantaneous luminosity will reach unprecedented values, resulting in about 200 proton-proton interactions in a typical bunch crossing. The current ATLAS Inner Detector will be replaced by an all-silicon system, the Inner Tracker (ITk). The innermost part of ITk will consist of a state-of-the-art pixel detector.
The individual modules of the ITk Pixel Detector...
This work presents the first simulation results of the incremental digital integration readout, a charge-integrating front-end scheme with in-pixel digitisation and accumulation. This novel readout concept [1] is at the core of the XIDER project, which aims at building 2D pixelated X-ray detectors optimised for high energy scattering and diffraction applications for the next generation of...
PET (Positron Emission Tomography) is an advanced imaging technique that uses radiotracers to target a specific biological or pathological process. This process produces radiotracers because the active/targeting compound labeled with the radioisotope is present at trace levels. These radiotracers are used to study biochemical processes in humans and animals. Performing PET on certain oncologic...
Arrays of 3D position-sensitive detectors (3DPSD) operating at room temperature and using cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) and thallium bromide (TIBr) sensors are suitable for gamma-ray spectrometry in many applications [1,2,3]. One detector configuration, the 3D position-sensitive virtual Frisch-grid detector (VFG), is particularly advantageous for integrating into large area arrays. The signals...
The new class of X-ray imaging detectors allows us to capture an image in various energy ranges in one shot [1]. This technique is called X-ray color imaging, and it is becoming a promising method in many applications such as medical imaging, computed tomography, and material testing [2]. To measure the energy spectrum in one shot, discriminant circuits need to be integrated into the pixel...
Timepix3 [1] was developed within the Medipix3 Collaboration at CERN as the successor of the widely used Timepix detector. The chip showed good performance in various domains – 3D track reconstruction [2, 3], radiation monitoring in particle physics experiments such as ATLAS or MoEDAL [4, 5]. Readout electronic systems were designed, e.g. SPIDR [6], ADVADAQ[7] and Katherine[8] with interfaces...
An abstract is attached.
Xenon TPCs with optical readout are being increasingly applied to rare event detection, in the important fields of cosmology and particle physics, e.g. dark matter search or neutrino physics studies such as double-beta decay, double electron capture and neutrino detection.
Through the years, it was assumed that secondary scintillation in noble gases was solely due to VUV emission from...
Nuclear waste monitoring and hazard detection software for Timepix3 detector network
Benedikt Bergmann1, Bartoloměj Biskup1, Petr Burian1,3, Petr Mánek1,2, Lukáš Meduna1,3,*
*1. Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Husova 240/5, 110 00 Prague, Czech Republic
2. Department of...
Organic crystalline, liquid and plastic scintillators with low Z number materials are commonly used to detect fast neutrons. These detectors are also sensitive to gamma rays by Compton scattering while measuring fast neutrons. Pulse shape discrimination (PSD) is used to distinguish between neutrons and gamma rays. To perform PSD, Charge Comparison method (or called Charge Integration method)...
The use of Computed Tomography at the micrometre scale (µCT) is becoming a viable solution in the field of virtual histology [1-2]. In principle, µCT can provide a complete three-dimensional visualization of histological specimens which can be virtually sliced at any point and in any direction. This, if not a diagnostic tool per se, can enable guided sectioning of tissues in histological...
Digital tomosynthesis (DTS) is a well-established multiplanar imaging technique that uses limited angular scanning to produce cross-sectional images of the scanned object with a moderate crossplane resolution. DTS images are typically reconstructed by using the computationally-cheap analytic filtered-backprojection (FBP) algorithm. This popular technique has been used in a variety of clinical...
Introduction
Astatine-211 is a promising radionuclide for targeted α-particle radiotherapy of cancers. It is required to image the distribution of targeted radiotherapeutic agents in a patient’s body before or during treatment for optimization of treatment strategies and determination of the suitability of a given agent for a particular patient [1]. Because the biodistribution of...
About half of the ATLAS pixel modules have been produced with the Indium bonding technology [1,2].
The building blocks are modules made of a silicon sensor tile (pixel size of 400x50 µm2, with a sensitive area 16,4 x 60,8 mm2) and 16 front-end (FE-I3, 200 µm thick and 7,6 x 10,8 mm2 area) integrated circuits, each serving 18 x 160 pixels. Bumps are at the same time the electrical and the...
Photosynthate translocation from source leaves to sink organs directly affects dry matter accumulation there and promotes auxetic growth of the sink tissues. In particular, the photosynthate translocation to root tissue is an important physiological function that affects growth of roots and determines plant growth, yield and quality. It is essential to evaluate the dynamics of photosynthate...
X-ray photon-counting detectors (XPCD) have gained substantial interest for biomedical and materials science applications due to their low-electronic noise, high-detection efficiency and energy-discrimination capabilities, compared to charge-integrating devices. The Pixirad-2/PIXIE-III is a hybrid XPCD with a 650 µm CdTe Schottky type diode with electron collection at pixel, bonded to the...
Muon tomography or “Muography” is an emerging imaging technique that uses cosmogenic muons as the radiation source. Due to its diverse range of applications and the use of natural radiation, muography is being applied across many fields such as geology, archaeology, civil engineering, nuclear reactor monitoring, nuclear waste characterization, underground surveys, etc. [1]. Muons can be...
The High energy cosmic-Radiation Detection(HERD)[1,2] facility has been proposed as one of several space astronomy payloads onboard the future China’s Space Station(CSS), which is planned for operation starting around 2026 for about 10 years. A cosmic ray tracker with position resolution of better than 1mm and effective detection area of 1m*1m is designed to do detector performance study.
The...
The MPMIB project (Multispectral photon-counting for medical imaging and beam characterization), funded via the Academy of Finland RADDESS programme, focuses on the development of a next generation radiation detection system operating in a photon-counting (PC) mode [1]. The extraction of spectrum per pixel data will lead to higher efficiency and image quality, as well as the possibility to...
The CMS experiment has planned to upgrade its muon system with GEM technology referred to as GE1/1, GE2/1 and ME0 for enhancing physics output. The GE1/1 chambers have already been installed in 2020 and are currently being commissioned. A zero-bias data set was taken to measure the radiation background from the GE1/1 demonstrator known as the “Slice Test”. It is known that the background...
In the new era of homeland security there is a growing concern regarding the possession and the potential use of radiological materials by terrorist groups usually in the form of a radiological dispersion device (RDD), also known as "dirty bomb". Since the defended areas from such a threat may not have specific entrance and exit points, the problem of how to localize a radioactive source in an...
I report the design and operation verification of two control systems for vertex detector dedicated for beam particle trajectory tracking. Both of the presented systems are designed to control and perform acquisition from the detector made of two layers of single photon counting hybrid pixel detectors (called later sensors). The alignment and synchronization of two sensors allows for particle...
Andrea Šagátová (1,*), Vladimír Kršjak(1), Stanislav Sojak(1), Oleg Riabukhin(2), Eva Kováčová(3) and Bohumír Zaťko(3)
(1)Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Institute of Nuclear and Physical Engineering, Ilkovičova 3, 812 19 Bratislava, Slovakia
(2)Department of Experimental Physics, Ural Federal University,...
Virtual clinical trials in x-ray breast imaging permit to compare different technical solutions and imaging modalities (2D vs 3D) at reduced costs related to apparatus management and involved personnel, and at reduced times and radiation risks to patients [1,2]. For a fair in-silico reproduction of clinical images, the patient models [3] and the simulated physics assume great importance. In...
Muons reach the surface of the earth with an approximately constant flux and deviate their trajectory when crossing matter. These deviations can be measured in order to obtain information or density maps about the inner state of preferably dense and big objects. Previous work done by the company Muon Systems, presenting the capacity of Muon Radiography to help in industrial problems can be...
All horse ridden disciplines result in stresses to both bony and soft tissue structures, with many breeds, in particular Western performance horses,experiencing extreme forces on the structures of the lower limb whilst executing transitions such as a tight turn or rapid acceleration. Lameness
subsequent to distal limb injury is common to both the performance and pleasure horse, resulting in...
A novel method of loading phosphor materials in plastic scintillators (here on PS) is demonstrated in this work. ZnS(Ag) and ZnO phosphor materials are integrated into thin PS medium to exploit high Z and phosphor characteristics of these materials in radiation detection. These PS are prepared using polystyrene as base, xylene as solvent, PPO and POPOP as primary and secondary flours and...
High-mountain scientific researches in the field of high energies are being carried out at the Tien Shan High Altitude Scientific Station (TSHASS) in collaboration with al-Farabi Kazakh National University. The interest in these studies is mainly connected with two insufficiently studied directions, which can significantly change the interpretation of the spectrum of cosmic rays not only in...
Dual-energy (DE) chest x-rays (CXRs) provide the ability to selectively imaging two relevant materials, soft tissue and bone structures, to better characterize various chest pathologies and potentially improve diagnosis of CXRs. Recently deep-learning-based image synthesis techniques have attracted much attention as another approach to replace exist DE methods (i.e., dual-exposure based,...
The presentation will describe the performances of planar hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) sensors with charge selective contacts developed in the framework of the fabrication of a 3D a-Si:H sensor. These devices were developped as an intermediate technological step towards the final detector but they have interseting flux/dose measuring capabilities by themselves.
The Cooling Storage Ring of the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL-CSR) is constructed to study nuclear physics, atomic physics, interdisciplinary science, and relative applications. There are many different kinds of detectors for radiation imaging in the experiments at HIRFL-CSR. To reduce the development time, production cost, and maintenance difficulties of the readout...
To adopt monolithic active pixel sensors for space-based applications requires to lower their power consumption and to optimize the heat dissipation, to fulfill the constraints imposed by satellite power and cooling capacity. MAPS will be used for the first time in space within the High Energy Particle Detector, onboard the CSES-02 satellite. Space-register requirements are met with a parallel...
Bohumír Zaťko1,*, Andrea Šagátová2, Katarína Sedlačková2, Ladislav Hrubčín1,3, Pavol Boháček1
1.Institute of Electrical Engineering, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 841 04 Bratislava, Slovakia
2.Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Institute of Nuclear and Physical Engineering, Ilkovičova 3, 812 19...
The Wuwei radiotherapy centre is the first carbon ion therapy facility in China .It can deliver 12C6+ beam with the energy up to ~410 MeV/A. The beam delivery system in the therapy facility ensures the beam energy deposition can cover the dedicated region in the body. It has been shown that Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) are very promising tools for direct online beam monitoring. Thus,...
The Ce3+ activated Y3Al5O12 (YAG:Ce) is a fast and efficient inorganic scintillator widely used in electron and X-ray detection systems. The single crystals of YAG:Ce achieve 90-120 ns decay constant of the scintillation pulse and light yield up to 30 000 photons/MeV. In previous studies, we have shown that RE3+ codoping of YAG:Ce and the...
This contribution presents an update on the Analytical Method (AM) algorithm for trigger primitive (TP) generation in the CMS Drift Tube (DT) chambers during the High Luminosity LHC operation (HL-LHC or LHC Phase 2). The algorithm has been developed and validated both in software with an emulation approach, and through hardware implementation tests. The algorithm is mainly divided in the...
Hybrid pixel detectors for radiation imaging suitable for 3-D particle tracking and reconstruction offer the capability of high-resolution measurement of Time-of-Arrival (ToA) parameter. ToA is the amount of time between the discriminator first edge and the moment when the shutter closes. Possible applications include electron microscopy and antimatter research [1]. For example, 1.58 ns ToA...
In a multi-channel radiation detector readout system, waveform sampling, digitization and transmitting bits to the data acquisition system constitutes a conventional processing chain. The quantities, such as time-of-arrival and signal magnitude, i.e. deposited energy is estimated by fitting analytical models over the acquired digital data extracting starting times of signals, peak amplitudes,...