Research Projects

Efficiently sensing and detecting high energy radiation is the key feature for several applications in many fields, including medical imaging, high energy physics (HEP), homeland security, oil drilling exploration and industrial control, just to name a few. Today, a large share of the market is occupied by inorganic scintillators, whose luminescence properties have been exploited for over a century. In the last three decades, a plethora of new scintillating materials have been discovered, progressively improving the performances of ionizing radiation detectors. Several parameters describe the key properties of a scintillating material, primarily the light yield, the energy resolution, the decay time, the material density, the chemical stability, and the radiation hardness. To date, no scintillating material excels in all these parameters and, therefore, each application relies on a different scintillator system satisfying the requirements of the respective most relevant physical parameter(s). This project aims to tackle the challenge of exploiting nanocrystals (NCs) for ionizing radiation detection. We will develop a novel strategy based on Ligand Assisted Re-Precipitation technique (LARP) to facilitate large scale, cost efficient, solution processable and versatile perovskite based NCs specifically conceived and optimized for scintillation, and use them to engineer and fabricate hybrid polymeric nanocomposites tailored for such applications. I will address each one of the three stages involved in the scintillation sequence: i) interaction with ionizing radiation and energy deposition, ii) energy transfer and carrier migration processes, and iii) propagation of the scintillation light inside nanocomposite waveguides and its extraction toward suitably selected photodetectors. Particularly, I aim to accomplish two specific goals focusing on two different application typologies: 1) Fast timing. We will prepare nanocomposite materials for fast timing applications aiming at a time resolution shorter than 100 ps. 2) Large volume scintillators. We will fabricate nanocomposite materials for applications where large detection volumes are required, and for which a short decay time is not a critical parameter. The obtained material will be self-absorption free, mass scalable at a price competing with conventional single crystals.