Throughout the world cryostats and dewars are used to transport and store liquid materials at very low temperatures. Those devices are often very large and can only be inspected during maintenance periods, when they are emptied. This project aims at developing a robot able to move freely inside the cold volume, perform inspections and transmit...
Light is a powerful tool to non-invasively probe scattering media for clinical applications. Time-domain (TD) technique relies on the injection of fast laser pulses and on the collection of the re-emitted photons though a single-photon detector. TD technique has 2 main advantages: i) disentangling scattering from absorption; ii) encoding the mean depth reached by the...
Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary and fast-growing market segment, primarily based on brain mapping investigations aimed to understand complex neuronal circuits and nervous operational pathways. It is well known that brain activity relies on interactions between large populations of neurons located in different brain regions. Understanding the relationships between these specific areas and disentangling the contributions...
THz fingerprints of astronomical objects are of a great value as they offer insights into history of the Universe, formation and evolution of galaxies and their central supermassive black holes, and other fundamental questions raised by astrophysics. Detection and decoding of these ultra-weak signals currently rely on THz bolometers placed outside Earth atmosphere (e.g. Herschel...
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is currently being used to establish if a patient diagnosed with cancer has developed metastasis in other organs in the body. This test is therefore used to decide the type of procedure to follow, usually based on chemo – and radio – therapies, but not for preventive screening. This decision is...
We propose a compact imaging and particle-tracking device, named INSTANT, consisting of a complete detection and image processing system, from pixel sensors to data processing electronics. It provides very high time (10ps) and space (10μm) resolution per pixel. Embedded data processing for data compression and real-time reconstruction of the recorded events is also a key...
PHOTOQUANT aims at exploiting the potential of the emerging field of nano-photonics for developing a new generation of highly efficient and ultrafast single-photon quantum sensors. The project proposes two different approaches: the first will exploit the ability of nanometallic structures to concentrate light into subwavelength volumes, designing an interface layer between the light source and...
Chemical and structural imaging with nano resolution under ambient conditions are of utmost importance for advancing our understanding of biological processes at the sub-cellular level, which is needed for achieving a thorough understanding of severe diseases such as cancers, neurodegenerative or autoimmune disorders. These perspectives motived over the past decades a consistent body of work...
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensors are one of the fundamental components of Internet of Things that aims at connecting every physical object to the cloud database for exchange of information and activities. Consequently, the development of low-cost, efficient, printable RFID sensors is a fundamental research domain for this future high-technology era. RFID is a powerful wireless...
Structural alongside functional smart materials play an important role in modern industry and technology. The behaviour of such materials is often governed by their structural properties. Knowledge on their specific grain formation and orientation is crucial for their development and use in prospective applications. Neutron diffraction plays a central role in the structural characterisation of...
The goal of this proposal is to implement broadband giant refraction (n>10) to achieve a basic building block in what could be termed a white-light photonics, an all-purpose achromatic white-light transducer. The white-light transducer will be able to transfer with maximum efficiency light from any angle of incidence to a photosensitive sensor, irrespective of the...
Since polarimetry provides complex information that other techniques (imaging or spectroscopy) cannot give, the development of innovative polarisation sensitive detectors is crucial for many advanced detection systems. The polarisation state of the light is a probe of the molecular structure and surface texture of the materials involved in light emission and contains information on the...
Glass and glass ceramics are attractive alternatives to the crystalline materials widely used in radiation detectors in basic research as well as for applications in medical diagnostics and homeland security detectors. The materials can be fabricated in moulds or by sol-gel techniques. Therefore, they can be prepared in various geometrical shapes such as blocks, plates,...
Integrated image sensors revolutionised the world of visible imaging and receive interest in many other fields. Monolithic CMOS pixel sensors have already been produced to cover a few square meters in some particle physics experiments. The ideal image sensor or camera would detect ionizing particles with an almost noise-free, large amplitude signal, tens of ps...
The enormous potential of silicon sensors in precise time measurement of ionizing particles is far from being exploited. At present, the best time resolutions in pixelated silicon is obtained by the proponents that have measured 100 and 130ps with low-noise ultra-fast SiGe HBT electronics in hybrid and monolithic implementations, respectively, without internal gain mechanism. Recently,...
This project aims at developing innovative biocompatible sensors able to monitor the status of tissue implants in vivo, at human scale. These sensors are aimed at reporting on the degradation of the scaffold and on the overall transplanted cells conditions. They represent a completely new class of MRI contrast agents that display remarkable relaxation effects...
The RaDFOS project has the ambitious goal of developing a dosimeter suitable for the next generation of particle accelerators and fusion reactors. The development of these new energy machine poses the need for new dosimetry technologies capable to measure the unprecedented level of dose expected from their operation, quantified above the MGy level. The RaDFOS...
Head and neck cancers represent the 6th most common type of cancer in Europe with around 150,000 new patients per year. Despite its severity and increasing prevalence, there is little awareness of this pathology. 60% of patients with advanced disease at diagnosis die within 5 years. The most common cancer in the head and neck...
The goal of FLASH (FLuorescence Analysis Speedup to extremely High rates) project is to develop a new detection system that combines single-photon sensitivity, picosecond temporal resolution, and unprecedented high throughput to acquire time-resolved fluorescence images. A similar system holds great promise to have a revolutionary impact on several fields of biology and medicine. For example,...
Quantum Simulators (QS) are systems that evolve a physical process obeying to the same constituent laws of quantum mechanics as the system under examination. While QS are still in their infancy, an industrial model would need a large degree of automation to address the hardware system calls, interpret results from measurements and perform recursive quantum...
