The recent technological breakthrough in cryo electron tomography (cryoET) opens to imaging, at close to atomic resolution, of macromolecular complexes in their native cellular context. This technique is seminal for a new field in Life Sciences referred to as cellular structural biology which is starting to shed light on how fine conformational states of protein...
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...
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...
MERMAID (Multi-Emission Radioisotopes – Marine Animal Imaging Device) proposes a unique imaging approach that opens the door to unexplored research paths in various disciplines. MERMAID will be the first dedicated imaging device for radioisotope imaging of small aquatic animals, thus paving the way to innovations in sustainable aquaculture and expanding the use of zebrafish as...
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...
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...
Silicon based single photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) are already a valuable technological solution to detect and accurately measure photons. Arranged in in extended arrays as Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM), they can provide both single-photon counting sensitivity and fast responsivity in large-area detectors. However, some of their promising applications (LiDAR and 3D-ranging imaging at 850÷950 nm wavelengths, spectroscopy with red and...
The socio-economic impact of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) in Europe is around €175B annually. There is no cure today but pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in developing new drugs. However, each newly developed drug has to be assessed through a series of clinical trials. This demands major resources in the lifecycle of a new drug. Within the...
The SPHINX project aims building an ultrafast X-ray holographic camera able to record images of microscopic samples and of their internal parts with nanometer resolution. The proposal is based on a new implementation of the phase-contrast holography, that overcomes the main limitations encountered in the current systems (mostly based on absorption-contrast), namely the low energy...
The overall aim of neaR-infrarEd resonant caVity enhancEd grAphene/siLicon photodetectors (REVEAL) is both to develop processes for the integration of graphene into a silicon (Si) technology platform and to realise high-performance Si-based photodetectors (PDs) operating at 1550 nm. Indeed, whilst the introduction of new material like graphene in a stable and reliable Si technology has to face...
Lighting is present in most indoor areas. Apart from illumination, lighting infrastructure can be used for data communication using Visible Light Communication (VLC) technology. VLC encodes the dta into fast changes on the intensity of the LED light and, at the receiver, these intensity fluctuations are detected using a Photodiode. So far, the presence of opaque objects inside...
