PETALO: a Time-of-Flight PET with liquid xenon

TL;DR

This paper introduces PETALO, a novel liquid xenon-based Time-of-Flight PET scanner that leverages liquid xenon's properties and Cherenkov light to achieve unprecedented time resolution, promising significant advancements in nuclear medicine imaging.

Contribution

The paper presents a new PET scanner concept using liquid xenon and silicon photomultipliers, achieving ultra-fast timing and high sensitivity through combined scintillation and Cherenkov light detection.

Findings

Monte Carlo simulations indicate a time resolution of 30-50 ps using Cherenkov light.

Liquid xenon provides high scintillation yield and fast decay, enabling improved PET performance.

Prototype development is underway to validate energy, time, and spatial resolution capabilities.

Abstract

Liquid xenon offers several features, which make it suitable for applications in nuclear medicine, such as high scintillation yield and fast scintillation decay time. Moreover, being a continuous medium with a uniform response, liquid xenon allows one to avoid most of the geometrical distortions of conventional detectors based on scintillating crystals. In this paper, we describe how these properties have motivated the development of a novel concept for positron emission tomography scanners with Time-Of-Flight measurement, which combines a liquid xenon scintillating volume and silicon photomultipliers as sensors. A Monte Carlo investigation has pointed out that this technology would provide an excellent intrinsic time resolution, down to 70 ps. Also, the transparency of liquid xenon to UV and blue wavelengths opens the possibility of exploiting both scintillation and Cherenkov light for a high-sensitivity positron emission tomography scanner with Time-Of-Flight capabilities. Monte Carlo simulations point to a time resolution of 30-50 ps obtained using Cherenkov light. A prototype is being built to demonstrate the high resolution in energy, time and reconstruction of spatial coordinates of this concept, using a ring of 30 cm internal diameter and a depth of 3 cm instrumented with VUV-sensitive silicon photomultipliers.