Position reconstruction of gamma-ray interaction in scintillator crystals

Nowadays numerous applications are employing ionising radiation as a non destructive probe to obtain information that is not available through visual inspection.
These applications range from medical imaging to industrial tomography and homeland security as well as archeometry and history of art. Furthermore, ionising radiation plays a key role in the quest for answering a wide range of fundamental physics questions. There are numerous examples of large-scale physics experiments around world to probe, for example, nuclear structure, particle physics or astrophysics through measurements with ionising radiation. Driven by these demanding applications and fundamental research, the technology for detecting ionising radiation has seen a remarkable progress in recent years. This progress, however, has occurred in many cases in academia and industry in parallel and the transfer of knowledge between them has been limited. There is a great potential gain and impact in building strong bridges between the two communities that will facilitate the knowledge transfer.

In this particular project we are interested in transferring the technology on position sensitive scintillator detectors and their use in gamma-ray imaging. This state-of-the-art technology has been developed within the academic community and is already being used in fundamental physics experiments. The transfer of this technology to industry will enable applications employing gamma-ray detection to reach a higher level of sensitivity and in particular it will impact directly areas such as medical imaging and nuclear security.