The Student's Specialist Laboratory is dedicated to second-degree physics students. Two exercise sets are available: "Miniature PET scanner" and "Particle time-fo-flight measurement". A new exercise is being prepared that will allow the determination of cross-section angular distributions for gamma quanta scattering via the Compton effect and the observation of the correlation between spins of annihilation gamma quanta.
Miniature PET scanner
The scanner consists of 16 scintillation detectors containing 10 x 10 matrices of BGO crystals read by position-sensitive vacuum photomultipliers. Impulses from the photomultipliers, carrying information about the position in the crystal matrix which registered the annihilation gamma quanta and the amount of deposited energy, are recorded by charge-to-digit converters read using the VME bus.
During the course students learn about the principle of positron emission tomography, prepare software for data acquisition, in particular for charge-to-digit converters, and analyze collected data for the reconstruction of the position of a 22Na point source used.
Particle time-of-flight measurement
In this exercise two plastic scintillation detectors read by silicon photomultipliers are used. The detectors are irradiated by an electron stream from a 90Sr source. Pulses from the photomultipliers are sampled by the amplitude-to-digit converter and stored in the computer's memory.
During the exercise, students get acquainted with the particle time-of-flight measurement method, determine basic parameters of a silicon photomultiplier, prepare scripts in the ROOT program to analyze the recorded impulses including the determination of a baseline, the amplitude and time of the impulses appearance, as well as determining of the spatial and time resolution of the strip scintillation detector.