Development Of The Thin Tof-Pet Scanner Based On Fast Monolithic Silicon Pixel Sensors

The Thin-TOF PET (TT-PET) project aims at the construction of a small-animal PET scanner based on silicon monolithic pixel sensors with 30 ps time resolution for 511 keV photons, equivalent to 100 ps time resolution for minimum ionizing particles. Iterative image reconstruction on Monte-Carlo simulation shows that the scanner can produce high signal-to-noise ratio images with good spatial resolution throughout the whole field of view. The demonstrator chip, comprising a 3 x 10 pixel matrix and a 50 ps binning TDC, was tested at the CERN SPS beam test facility. The demonstrator shows an efficiency greater than 99.9% and a time resolution for minimum ionizing particles of approximately 110 ps.