Matteo Salomoni

CERN | CERN · LHCb

For the first time hafnia (HfO2) nanoparticles have been produced by photochemical synthesis. The photochemical route has been proven to be a scalable, affordable, and straightforward to create monoclinic HfO2...

The demand for detectors with a time resolution below 100 ps is at the center of research in different fields, from high energy physics to medical imaging. In recent years, interest has grown in nanomaterials that, benefiting from quantum confinement effects, can feature ultra-fast scintillation kinetics and tunable emission. However, standard char...

Objective: TOF-PET would highly benefit from a coincidence time resolution (CTR) below 100 ps: improvement in image quality and patient workflow, and reduction of delivered dose are among them. This achievement proved to be quite challenging, and many approaches have been proposed and are being investigated for this scope. One of the most recent co...

A spaghetti calorimeter (SPACAL) prototype with scintillating crystal fibres was assembled and tested with electron beams of energy from 1 to 5 GeV. The prototype comprised radiation-hard Cerium-doped Gd$_3$Al$_2$Ga$_3$O$_{12}$ (GAGG:Ce) and Y$_3$Al$_5$O$_{12}$ (YAG:Ce) embedded in a pure tungsten absorber. The energy resolution was studied as a fu...

A new inorganic scintillation material based on Ba-Gd silica glass doped with cerium (BGS) is fabricated and studied. With the highest light yield among heavy glasses at the level of 2500 ph/MeV and fast scintillation response, the new scintillator ensures a good coincidence time resolution of < 230 ps FWHM for 511 keV γ-quanta from a ²²Na source a...

Scintillators, materials that produce light pulses upon interaction with ionizing radiation, are widely employed in radiation detectors. In advanced medical-imaging technologies, fast scintillators enabling a time resolution of tens of picoseconds are required to achieve high-resolution imaging at the millimetre length scale. Here we demonstrate th...

Today Time-Of-Flight (TOF), in PET scanners, assumes a single, well-defined timing resolution for all events. However, recent BGO-Cherenkov detectors, combining prompt Cherenkov emission and the typical BGO scintillation, can sort events into multiple timing kernels, best described by Gaussian mixture models. The number of Cherenkov photons detecte...

Standard image reconstruction in PET scanners assumes a unique, well-defined time resolution for all coincidence events. However, recently developed detectors combining prompt emission and typical scintillation signal are capable of sorting events into different categories with respect to timing resolution. BGO scintillators, thanks to silicon phot...

Metasurfaces and, in particular, metalenses have attracted large interest and enabled various applications in the near-infrared and THz regions of the spectrum. However, the metalens design in the visible range stays quite challenging due to the smaller nanostructuring scale and the limited choice of lossless CMOS-compatible materials. We develop a...

Today Time-Of-Flight in PET scanners assumes a unique, well-defined timing resolution for all coincidence events. However, recent BGO-Cherenkov detectors, combining prompt Cherenkov emission and the typical BGO scintillation signal, are capable of sorting events into multiple mixture timing kernels and therefore increase the available information f...

Today Time-Of-Flight in PET scanners assumes a unique, well-defined timing resolution for all coincidence events. However, recent BGO-Cherenkov detectors, combining prompt Cherenkov emission and the typical BGO scintillation signal, are capable of sorting events into multiple mixture timing kernels and therefore increase the available information...

Scintillating crystals are used in numerous applications of ionizing radiation detectors. In time of flight positron emission tomography (TOF-PET) for example, both energy- and coincidence time resolution (CTR) are important characteristics that could significantly benefit if more light from scintillators, otherwise trapped, could be collected by t...

The extraction of scintillation light from an inorganic scintillator is one of the major bottlenecks in time-of-flight positron emission tomography (ToF-PET) because it directly affects the energy and time resolution of the gamma detector. To increase the light extraction efficiency, we use photonic crystal slabs (PCS), defined as thin dielectric l...

The extraction of scintillation light from a crystal with high efficiency and low time jitter is vital for realizing much-needed gains in the performance of numerous radiation detection and imaging instruments that are vital components in medical imaging, industrial, and homeland security applications for the detection, localization, and energy cla...

Inorganic scintillators are commonly used as sensors for ionizing radiation detectors in a variety of applications, ranging from particle and nuclear physics detectors, medical imaging, nuclear installations radiation control, homeland security, well oil logging and a number of industrial non-destructive investigations. For all these applications,...

In order to demonstrate the benefits of photonic crystals for PET imaging, the partners of the Turbo-PET project are committed to the development of a new high-resolution, high-sensitivity nuclear imaging breast PET system. CERN and UTT develop and simulate light extracting photonic solutions. NAPA patterns the LYSO scintillating crystals blocks (T...

Fast timing has emerged as a critical requirement for radiation detection in medical and high energy physics, motivating the search for scintillator materials with high light yield and fast time response. However, light emission rates from conventional scintillation mechanisms fundamentally limit the achievable time resolution, which is presently a...