One of the processes that are mostly exploited in particle detection is scintillation, whereby light in transparent media (organic or inorganic materials, including salts, gases, and liquids) is emitted following the absorption of ionising radiation. Scintillation is the result of a spontaneous decay, with relatively slow fluorescence decay time and isotropic emission. In this project...
The goal of this project is to develop an innovative detector – called GEMTEQ – for microdosimetry. Microdosimetry is the study of the temporal and spatial distributions of absorbed energy in biological matter and is crucial for the understanding of the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of radiation on human tissue, for example of a carbon ion beam...
LIDAR is a distance and speed measurement apparatus using reflection characteristics of an emitted light. A laser emits a brief coherent light pulse at a defined frequency. A photodetector measures the reflected light. The time between emitted and detected light allows to compute the distance from the target. Frequency shift in the reflected light also...
Osteoarticular diseases are the most prevalent chronic pains and long-term disabilities with hundreds of millions people affected worldwide. They represent a major socioeconomic burden: a recent study estimated that the cost of arthritis, in industrialised countries, is ranging from 1% up to 2.5% of Gross National Product. Until now there is a lack of imaging...
FastPix is a reconfigurable low light-level (LLL) hybrid sensor that can be scaled to arbitrarily large areas and that aims to detect the time of arrival of single photons with a time resolution (SPTR) close to 10 ps. The FastPix performance will be at least one order of magnitude better than any existing technology in time, spatial...
X-ray tomography is an incredibly useful diagnostic tool in various sectors of medicine. However, the typical radiation dose the patient absorbs during a ct scan is quite high, so that less informative tools must be often used instead. A drastic reduction of the radiation dose would open x-ray tomography to vast new applications, e.g. preventive...
The vision PRIMELOC envisions a future where location-based services, enabled outdoor by Galileo or GPS, will be widely provided also in indoor spaces, thanks to the availability of automatically generated maps and infrastructure-less localisation inside buildings. In this project, we devise the new concept of personal radar as a fundamental step toward this goal. This concept stems...
Microscopy (whether using neutral systems, such as photons or atoms, or charged systems, such as electrons) requires the ability to “optically” manipulate low energy particles, through a series of “lenses” that are used to focus a beam and scan it across a surface (except in the case of atomic force microscopy, where the divergently emitting...
Life is more than the sum of its constituent molecules. It is dependent on the way these molecules interact and cooperate with each other, i.e., the way they are organised in self-sustaining chemical reaction networks. Understanding the general chemical organisation underlying living systems, and even more so the ability to have such systems emerge and evolve...
Diagnosis of epilepsy critically depends on electroencephalography (EEG) machines and specialists trained to manually characterise the acquired brain signals. Clinical-grade EEG machines are immobile, expensive, and rely on dedicated recording rooms where background noise and distractions are minimised and data is stored on servers. Globally, most people with epilepsy live in rural resource-poor areas where these diagnostic...
In the electromagnetic spectrum just between the microwaves that we use in our WiFi and Bluetooth devices and the infrared light there is a mostly unexplored region, named the TeraHertz (THz) gap, consisting of electromagnetic (EM) waves with frequencies comprised between 0.1 to 10THz, which is waiting to be exploited. THz radiation may have amazing technological applications. These...
The plastics industry is a major player in the European economy, and has an important role to play in the ecological transition into an energy-efficient and waste-free society. In addition to a higher recycling rate, a better design of plastic products is critical to reach Europe’s sustainable development goals as well as to stay competitive. The present project...
Cancer is among the main causes for death in the EU. According to Eurostat more than 350,000 cancer-related surgeries in Germany and France were carried out in 2016 only. All surgeries face the same challenge: Was all cancerous tissue removed from the patient? Answering this question reliably during the surgery itself is vital, but unfortunately not possible...
The GP2 Module will be a state-of-the-art detector for imaging and 3D reconstruction within the emergent field of energy-resolved neutron imaging (ERNI). Neutron imaging is a well-established technique in which a beam of neutrons is used to record a radiograph of a sample, the neutronic equivalent to the familiar hospital x-ray of a broken bone. However, the full...
High-content screening (HCS) is a technology for high-throughput phenotypic analysis of cells which is integrated into all aspects of contemporary drug discovery and development and increasingly attracts attention in cell biology. HCS enables investigating a variety of cell phenotypes including those linked to the cell metabolism. However, despite the growing interest to understand metabolism – in particular as a...
The HyPeR project objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of hyperspectral remote sensing to detect macro plastics (>25mm) and microplastics (1-5mm) in marine conditions and provide specifications for a data acquisition system for monitoring the marine plastics based upon a hyperspectral sensor. The proven knowledge that plastic polymers possess unique optical signatures in the Near InfraRed (NIR)...
A photocathode is a thin multilayer, usually deposited onto a transparent glass window. Its function is to absorb soft (visual) photons entering through the window, and to subsequently emit a detectable photoelectron into the adjacent vacuum. The probability that an incoming soft photon results in the emission of a photoelectron never exceeded 40%. With this high risk/high impact...
