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Abstract
| We are developing a new scintillation concept, which will become part of the second generation of metascintillators. The first generation approached 100 ps equivalent coincidence time resolution (CTR) in a PET scanner configuration with LYSO/plastic and LYSO/BaF2designs, and reached 200 ps with much cheaper BGO/plastic and BGO/BaF2heterostructures. Some of these designs allowed the determination of the depth of interaction (DOI). In the second generation of metascintillators, the fast scintillator (plastic or BaF2) will be replaced by even faster, denser and more compact nanophotonic features.We report here on the first very encouraging results obtained in the lab on a multilayer system exploiting the Purcell effect, with the double effect of 1) strongly enhancing the coupling of the electromagnetic wave associated with the incident g-ray to the optical states of the material and 2) restricting the angular distribution of the scintillation light to a small cone in the direction of the photodetector.These encouraging results make us confident that the implementation of such features in a second generation of metacintillators will bring significant benefits in terms of detection efficiency and timing resolution. |