Single light photon counting radiation detector and data transmission methods
| DWPI Title: Single light photon counting radiation detector, has a detector channel with a photomultiplier in optical communication with a scintillator monolith, and front end signal shaper is in electronic communication with the photo multiplier |
| Abstract: A single photon radiation detector is designed for a particular radiation source fluence, such that an incident radiation photon strikes a scintillator monolith, creating scintillation photons, which are amplified by appropriately sized channels of photomultipliers optically coupled to the scintillator monolith. The photomultiplier output is electronically shaped into a corresponding stream of scintillation pulses (otherwise referred to as scintillation photons) that pass through a comparator to produce a bitstream of the detected scintillation photons, which is sampled into a field programmable gate array (FPGA) acting as a giga-sample transceiver to produce time-to-digital conversions, capable of producing an output data stream of 10's-of-giga-samples per second or more. Appropriate design ensures sparsity of scintillation photon arrival, so that each photon in the bitstream corresponds to a single incident scintillation photon. |
| Use: Single light photon counting radiation detector. |
| Advantage: The detector can provide improved performance over detectors that extract information on ionizing radiation from aggregate pulse shape information. The detector provides unique timestamps and positions for detected scintillation photons, so that the detector can take advantage of coupled three-dimensional position and time of interaction of ionizing light, and can be intrinsically encoded in spatiotemporal arrival time profiles of scintillator light maps. |
| Novelty: The detector has a detector channel with a photomultiplier in optical communication with a scintillator monolith. The front end signal shaper is in electronic communication with the photo multiplier, where an input of a single incident radiation photon interacts with the monolith to create scintillation photons. A comparator inputs a stream of pulses to output a photon counting bitstream. A gigabit transceiver converts the bitstream into a time-to-digital (TDC) converted digital output. An aggregator consolidates the TDC converted digital outputs of the channel. |
| Filed: 10/12/2023 |
| Application Number: US18486026A |
| Tech ID: SD 16640.2 |
| This invention was made with Government support under Contract No. DE-NA0003525 awarded by the United States Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration. The Government has certain rights in the invention. |
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