Acoustic delay lines

Abstract

Over the last decade there have been commercial TOF-PET scanners constructed using Photo-Multiplier Tubes (PMT) that have achieved ~500ps FWHM Coincidence Time Resolution (CTR). A new device known as the Silicon PhotoMultiplier (SiPM) has the potential to overcome some of the limitations of the PMT. Therefore implementing a SiPM based TOF-PET scanner is of high interest. Recently Philips has introduced a TOF-PET scanner that uses digital Silicon PhotoMultipliers (d-SiPMs) which has a CTR of 350 ps. Here we will report on the timing performance of two Hamamatsu 3×3 mm2 analogue-SiPMs read out with the NINO ASIC: this is an ultra-fast amplifier/discriminator with a differential architecture. The differential architecture is very important since the single-ended readout uses the ground as the signal return; as the ground is also the reference level for the discriminators, the result is high crosstalk and degraded time resolution. However differential readout allows the scaling up from a single cell to a multi-cell device with no loss of time resolution; this becomes increasingly important for the highly segmented detectors that are being built today, both for particle and for medical instrumentation.We obtained excellent results for both the Single Photon Time Resolution (SPTR) and for the CTR using a LYSO crystal of 15 mm length. Such a crystal length has sufficient detection efficiency for 511 keV gammas to make an excellent PET device. The results presented here are proof that a TOF-PET detector with a CTR of 175 ps is indeed possible. This is the first step that defines the starting point of our SuperNINO project.