A brain stroke occurs when the flow of oxygen-rich blood to a portion of the brain is obstructed or when a blood vessel leaks or bursts. It is the second leading cause of death in Europe, and 60% of the survivors have different degrees of disability, with a socio-economic impact of the first magnitude for...
The aim of this project is to develop a wearable sensing platform by integrating two emerging technologies: metamaterial sensors and piezoelectric polymers. Moreover, 3D printing techniques will be utilised to fabricate the platform for realizing versatile, cost-effective and personalised devices. The integration of electromagnetic metamaterials and piezoelectric smart materials onto one mechanically flexible platform has...
Biological processes at the interface of cell and developmental biology are highly dynamic and take place on several spatial and temporal scales. Methods allowing to visualise and quantify these processes across scales are becoming indispensable for modern biological and biomedical research and applications. Fluorescent microscopy has emerged as a powerful technique to acquire spatial and...
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...
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...
Ultra-high radiation levels (particle fluence up to 1018 part./cm2 and ionising dose up to 100 MGy), are expected in the next generation of High Energy Physics (HEP) colliders currently under study at CERN. State of the art solid-state devices for radiation and particle measurement (mainly passive devices or silicon-based active sensors) are not capable 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...
In the year 2000, the HEP community decided to adopt the recent concept of computing grid for the computing of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (LHC). It took a decade of intense work to turn the Grid vision to reality. It was also a successful decision, as the worldwide LHC computing...
The transverse position of the charged particle beam circulating in an accelerator is one of the most basic yet crucial observables. Efficient and safe operation of every accelerator, as well as performance reach of many physic experiments, relies heavily on accurate beam position measurements. Such measurements are typically performed with Beam Position Monitors (BPM) –...
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...
Any sensitive detection instrument seeks to isolate a usually very rare signal out of -an often overwhelming amount of- undesired, disturbing background events. Hence, breakthroughs in an instruments’ sensitivity are typically associated with more efficient detection of the former and/or more effective suppression of the latter. For sensitive optical devices this implies that the detection...
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,...
One of the major radiation modalities for treating cancer is hadron radiotherapy, which at present uses protons and carbon ions. This is mainly because hadrons have the unique feature of increasing energy deposition with penetration depth, with maximum energy deposition at the end of the range followed by a sharp decrease (Bragg peak). However, treatment...
The Low Temperature Communication Link is a component of a more ambitious programme “Smart Diagnostics of Superconducting Magnets”. The initial idea of “Smart Diagnostics” is included in the FuSuMaTech Initiative. It comes from considering a superconducting magnet as an IoT (Internet of Things) device. Even if this is presented as targeting superconducting magnets the solution...
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...
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...
The idea of global, low earth orbit satellite constellations delivering high data rate free-space communication from and to any point in the world is reaching maturity. Projects by SpaceX, OneWeb, Facebook and Google are only a few examples of many initiatives which have recently been publicised. Key to the success of such deployments is the...
We propose a new type of optimised and highly sensitive beta-imaging camera with active background rejection POSICS for radio-guided surgery (RGS) and potentially for many other applications. The RGS technique is used to help surgeons to locate precisely tumours, and minimise the surgical invasiveness thus improving patient life quality after the intervention. Currently, the beta-emitting...
The era of Big Data has opened a new chapter in various fields of science, medicine, and business by allowing knowledge to be extracted from vast quantities of collected data, which has never been possible before. In High Energy Physics, the discovery of the Higgs boson would not have been possible without a carefully designed...
