Silicon drift photodetectors for scintillation readout in medical imaging

In the attempt to improve system performances of position-sensitive γ-ray detectors with contemporary ease of use and compactness, the use of silicon photodetectors for scintillation readout has become of increasing interest. With respect to the long-established photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), silicon photodiodes (PDs) have the advantages of higher quantum efficiency (QE), smaller dimensions and lower biasing voltages. Avalanche photodiodes (APDs) combine the high QE and compactness of PDs with the benefit of a moderate avalanche multiplication gain, which reduced the electronics noise contribution. However, the statistical component is again affected by the statistics of the multiplication itself (noise factor), and the noise component is still appreciable mainly in the high energy range. Moreover, the sensitivity of the gain to temperature and biasing variations represents a potential practical drawback in the use of APDs arrays for the application. As an alternative to the mentioned photodetectors, silicon drift detectors (SDDs) have recently shown to achieve excellent performances in scintillation light detection. The SDD is a photodetector characterized by an area-independent, low-value output capacitance (100 fF), which is one of the major factors limiting the noise performances of the other silicon detectors’ technologies. SDDs used for CsI(Tl) scintillation readout have already shown to achieve state-of-the-art energy resolution in γ-ray spectroscopy, and monolithic arrays of SDDs have been recently experimented for the development of Anger cameras for high-resolution γ-ray imaging. In this work, is the performances achievable with SDDs in both energy and spatial resolution are discussed together with a review of the most important results achieved with first prototypes of SDD-based γ-ray detectors.