Design and Study of Scintillator Crystals coupled to Silicon Photomultipliers for PET Application

A relatively new photodetector, the silicon photomultiplier (SiPM), is well suited for PET applications. It has similar sensitivity and gain to the industry standard photomultiplier tube (PMT), but has advantages such as smaller size and insensitivity to magnetic field. These properties make SiPMs an active area of research in the PET field. I will study a simplified setup, comprised of two antiparallel SiPM/LSO coupled detectors using a Na-22 positron source. The coincidence timing and energy resolution will be determined for several crystal geometries and SiPM configurations. To simulate the experiment, GEANT4 code will be formulated to reproduce the results. Once the code successfully simulates this simple set-up, it can be extrapolated to simulate more complicated (and realistic) detector designs.