Particle physicist turns his hand t… – Information Centre – Research & Innovation
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When the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012, Paul Lecoq was just one of the physicists who designed it attainable. Now, as principal investigator in the EU-funded TICAL task, he has been applying his abilities in constructing particle detectors to troubles relating to health care imaging.
From the extremely beginning, I had the intuition that the technology I was proposing to increase the functionality of our particle physics detectors would have a strong effect in health care physics, he suggests.
Until eventually recently, Lecoq labored at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, as technical coordinator for just one of the detectors for the Large Hadron Collider. Acknowledged as a calorimeter, the detector employs dense crystalline blocks, called scintillators, to capture particles as they move as a result of. The power of the particle appears as flash of light which is picked up by delicate photodetectors.
In practice, a superior-power particle will deliver a shower of other particles in the scintillator but the reaction of the scintillator is just also slow to document the complexity of the shower.
Nanocrystals
With funding for the TICAL task from the European Research Council, Lecoq set out to devise a new kind of scintillator that could extra specifically document the position and timing of occasions in the shower. What I want is a reconstruction of the spatial growth of the shower and also the time I want to know the dynamics of it.
His resolution was to use nanocrystals little crystals of scintillator materials that are little ample for quantum outcomes to dominate and for a captured particle to emit a a great deal sharper flash of light. By sandwiching thin layers of nanocrystals amongst sheets of standard scintillator, Lecoqs meta-scintillator lets the particle shower to be tracked extra correctly.
Meta-scintillators could drastically increase the particle detectors at CERN but that is not the complete tale.
For many decades, Lecoq focused on PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanners, the imaging equipment made use of to probe the interior of the human human body, particularly for cancer diagnosis. They rely on detecting gamma rays using a great deal the exact rules as CERNs particle detectors.
I made use of to say that the one hundred-tonne calorimeter, the building of which I was accountable for at the Large Hadron Collider, is absolutely nothing but a gigantic PET scanner, he jokes.
Ten picosecond challenge
At existing, the greatest PET scanners can time the arrival of a gamma ray to much better than five hundred picoseconds. With the TICAL meta-scintillators finally able of a precision of 10 picoseconds fifty times much better Lecoq envisages long run PET scanners equipped to deliver a great deal sharper illustrations or photos. They would also demand a great deal fewer radioactive materials and likely have broader applications in medicine.
Lecoq is presently searching for sponsors for a Ten picosecond challenge to style and design and construct gamma-ray detectors for PET applications able of this greater time resolution.
TICAL finished at the conclude of 2018 but Lecoq, retired from CERN, is now co-CEO of Multiwave Metacrystal, a business created to commercialise the function of the task. It is environment up a laboratory in collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Valencia to produce meta-scintillators. Initially, they would be for PET scanners whilst they also have likely for other industrial and security applications.
Lecoq sees the task as a vintage illustration of how European funding can permit a completely nuts idea to mature to the issue wherever it can be commercialised for the very good of society. For me, the ERC grant was superb. The European Commission has truly performed the position it must play.