Programma: PRIN
Responsabile scientifico per il dipartimento: Laura Basiricò
Struttura principale: DIFA
Data inizio e data fine: dal 28/09/2023 al 28/09/2025
Imaging 4D con scintillatori per fisica e medicina
Il progetto sviluppa rivelatori a scintillazione con imaging 4D per misurare posizione, energia e direzione delle particelle, con applicazioni in fisica delle alte energie, medicina e industria.
4D Scintillator Imaging for Physics and Medicine
The project develops scintillation detectors with 4D imaging to measure particle position, energy, and direction, with applications in high-energy physics, medical, and industrial imaging.
Abstract
The ability to combine position and energy measurements is an attractive prospect for particle detectors in many subfields of HighEnergy Physics (HEP). This feature can find applications in other fields of research, particularly in medical or industrial imagingdevices.We propose a technique that enables the use of a homogeneous and continuous scintillating medium as the active target for particleinteractions, coupled with compact imaging devices based on Coded Aperture Masks and Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) arrays thatcan provide a four-dimensional map of the energy deposited in the scintillator with fine spatial and temporal resolution.Measuring a three-dimensional scintillation amplitude distribution can provide not just the position of the first interaction, but alsodirectional information of individual secondary particles or showers, that correlates with the primary particles' momenta. This isespecially important for neutral particles, whose trajectory is not easily measured by traditional tracking detectors. Positionalinformation can also be used to improve both timing and energy resolution with respect to a non-imaging detector, by allowing toprecisely account for propagation delays and attenuation in the scintillating medium.We plan to produce Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of a variety of scintillating media and geometries representative of both HEP andmedical/industrial tomographic applications, to develop and optimize reconstruction algorithms based on both analytical andnumerical approaches. These algorithms will be responsible for decoding the raw sensor information and produce the scintillationamplitude distribution. We plan to also develop the analysis methods necessary to extract relevant physical parameters from thisdistribution.The use of coded aperture mask will allow us to build the imaging devices needed to measure the scintillation amplitude distributionin a compact and cost-effective way. We plan to produce prototypes showing their applicability to several fields, for detectors basedon cryogenic and non-cryogenic liquid scintillators as well as solid scintillators