Temporal Imaging CeBr3 Compton Camera: A New Concept for Nuclear Decommissioning and Nuclear Waste Management

During nuclear decommissioning or waste management operations, a camera that could make an image of the contamination field and identify and quantify the contaminants would be a great progress. Compton cameras have been proposed, but their limited efficiency for high energy gamma rays and their cost have severely limited their application. Our objective is to promote a Compton camera for the energy range (200 keV – 2 MeV) that uses fast scintillating crystals and a new concept for locating scintillation event: Temporal Imaging. Temporal Imaging uses monolithic plates of fast scintillators and measures photons time of arrival distribution in order to locate each gamma ray with a high precision in space (X,Y,Z), time (T) and energy (E). This provides a native estimation of the depth of interaction (Z) of every detected gamma ray. This also allows a time correction for the propagation time of scintillation photons inside the crystal, therefore resulting in excellent time resolution. The high temporal resolution of the system makes it possible to veto quite efficiently background by using narrow time coincidence (< 300 ps). It is also possible to reconstruct the direction of propagation of the photons inside the detector using timing constraints. The sensitivity of our system is better than 1 nSv/h in a 60 s acquisition with a 22Na source. The project TEMPORAL is funded by the ANDRA/PAI under the grant No. RTSCNADAA160019