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ST: Fachverband Strahlen- und Medizinphysik

ST 9: Radiation Monitoring and Dosimetry

ST 9.5: Talk

Thursday, March 21, 2024, 16:00–16:15, PC 203

Optimizing the Energy Resolution of the ATLAS IBL Pixel Detector for Proton Imaging — Dennis Hermelyn, Kevin Kröninger, Hendrik Speiser, •Helen Thews, and Jens Weingarten — TU Dortmund, department of physics

In radiotherapy for cancer treatment, proton therapy is an important method because of the steep dose gradient which allows a conformale dose distribution in the tumour while protecting the healthy tissue. However, patient misalignment and the uncertainties of the calculated stopping power using the conversion of Houndsfield units lead to larger safety margins around the tumour.

One opportunity to decrease the uncertainties is the usage of proton radiography imaging. Investigations in the past showed the feasibility of proton range measurement with ATLAS IBL pixel detectors despite their limitations in energy resolution.

As part of a master thesis, the concept of superpixel tuning is studied to improve the energy resolution of the detector. A superpixel includes multiple pixel that have different fine tunings to measure adjacent small energy ranges. With that, besides the higher energy resolution a broader range of deposited energy in the detector can be measured. In addition a spatial resolution is maintained to obtain two dimensional images.

This talk will introduce the concept of superpixel tuning and discuss its technical realization. Subsequently, first results of the study about arising challenges in data post-processing are discussed. Finally, the achieved change of the energy resolution is shown.

Keywords: proton imaging; pixel detector; energy resolution