On May 23rd, 2019, in the frame of the course “Semiconductor Radiation Detectors” and of the IEEE Distinguished Lecturers Program, Paul Lecoq, Senior Physicist CERN Physics Department (PH), Genève, Switzerland IEEE NPS Distinguished Lecturer, will give a seminar on “The 10ps Time-of_Flight PET challenge” 

The future generation of radiation detectors is more and more demanding on timing performance for a wide range of applications, such as time of flight (TOF) techniques for PET cameras and particle identification in nuclear physics and high energy physics detectors, precise event time tagging in high luminosity accelerators and a number of photonic applications based on single photon detection. A target of 10ps coincidence time resolution in TOFPET scanners would introduce a paradigm shift in PET imaging. Besides resulting in on-line image formation, the localisation of annihilation events directly from their TOF provides ultimate use of the dose delivered to the patient to get the best Signal to Noise Ratio into the resulting image and offers a potential reduction of the scan duration and a direct access to the image during the scan itself. Reconstruction-less TOF-PET also reduces efficiently undesired effects inherent to the PET detection, namely “randoms” and “scatters” when appropriately correlated to energy discrimination, hence contributing to reduce dose, scan duration and possibly scan cost while using very shortlived positron emitting isotopes. This talk will review the different processes at work and evaluate if some of the transient phenomena taking place during the fast thermalization phase can be exploited to extract a time tag with a precision in the few ps range. Some considerations will also be given on the possibility to exploit quantum confinement for the production of ultrafast spontaneous or stimulated emission in semi-conductors. Finally, the present limitations of the photodetectors, and in particular the SiPMs will be discussed and some R&D lines to meet the 10ps challenge will be presented.

The IEEE NPSS Distinguished Lecturers Program sponsors the presentation of lectures at NPSS Chapter meetings as well as at IEEE Section and Student Chapter meetings.
More info at: https://ieee-npss.org/distinguished-lecturers/

Paul Lecoq received his diploma as Engineer in Physics Instrumentation at the Ecole Polytechnique de Grenoble in 1972, under the leadership of Nobel Laureate Louis Néel. After two years of work at the Nuclear Physics laboratory of the University of Montreal, Canada, he received his PhD in Nuclear Physics in 1974. Since then he has been working at CERN in 5 major international experiments on particle physics, one of them led by Nobel Laureate Samuel Ting. His action on detector instrumentation, and particularly on heavy inorganic scintillator materials received a strong support from Carlo Rubbia and Georges Charpak. He was the technical coordinator of the electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS experiment at CERN, which played an important role in the discovery of the Higgs boson. Paul Lecoq is the founder of the CERN-based international Crystal Clear collaboration regrouping 28 institutes and companies worldwide contributing to the development of scintillator science. He has also created the SCINT conference series in 1991, which gathers together the international community working on fundamental aspects, production technologies and applications of scintillators every second year. As a member of a number of advisory committees and of international Societies he has since 2002 been the promoter of the CERIMED initiative (European Center for Research in Medical Imaging) for networking physics and medicine in the field of medical imaging. He was the initiator and technical coordinator of the European FP7 EndoTOFPET-US project and for the European EUROSTARS TURBOPET project. He was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2008 and as head of the Physics division of the Academy in 2017. He has been awarded an Advanced Grant on Time Imaging Calorimetry by the European Research Council in 2013 and was elected IEEE fellow in 2015.
Main positions: 
Elected Member of the European Academy of Sciences (2008), head of the Physics Division since January 2017. 
Senior Physicist at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Geneva, Switzerland (diplomat status). 
Technical coordinator for the construction of the electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Initiator and Technical coordinator of the European FP7 EndoTOFPETUS project.
Initiator and Technical coordination of the European EUROSTARS TURBOPET project.
PI of the ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant TICAL (Time Imaging Calorimeter).