Radiation Detector and Imaging Group

Overview 

The Jefferson Lab Radiation Detector and Imaging Group, headed by Dr. Drew Weisenberger has the primary mission of supporting detector development for the experimental nuclear physics research program using the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab. For more than 30 years, the group has been involved in numerous collaborations resulting in many application-specific radiation-imaging systems based on technology used in nuclear physics research. The group has worked directly in the development and testing of several detectors for the original three experimental halls (Halls A, B, and D). The Detector Group has access to the experimental halls in order to perform tests on detector components under experimental conditions

In addition to open laboratory areas and tools available to the general research personnel at Jefferson Lab, the Detector Group has a 1300 ft2 laboratory work area available to it exclusively on the Jefferson Lab campus. Within this lab there are equipment, materials and tools necessary for particle physics detector development and testing. These items include sealed radioactive calibration sources, digital and analog oscilloscopes, dark boxes for detector and scintillator testing, high voltage supplies, several computer workstations interfaced to VME based, stand alone FPGA JLab developed flash analog to digital electronics and three tabletop 3-D printers to build prototypes and finished plastic parts.

The Group's technical capabilities are applicable not only to nuclear physics radiation detector development, but also to application spin-offs of the detector technology. Jefferson Lab has been awarded over fifty US patents based on inventions developed by Detector Group members.

The Group's technical capabilities include expertise in several areas relevant to radiation imaging detector development, including:

  1. Component technologies of pixilated scintillators, position-sensitive photomultiplier tubes (PSPMT), solid state detectors, silicon photomultipliers (SIPM), light guides and micro-pattern gaseous detectors (MPGD);
  2. Fast analog and digital detector readout electronics design and construction;
  3. Software development for real-time computer-controlled data acquisition and
  4. Monte Carlo and analytic simulation and tomographic image reconstruction for nuclear medicine imaging.

Detector Group Facilities

  • Optical Bench
  • Photon Detector Dark Boxes
  • Clean Rooms
  • 3-D Printers

Advanced Detectors for Medical and Biology Imaging