Abstract: An upgrade of the successful asymmetric e(+)e(-) collider in KEK (Tsukuba, Japan) is foreseen by the fall of 2013. This new Super Flavor Factory will deliver an increased instantaneous luminosity of up to L = 8 x 10(35) cm(-2) s(-1), 40 times larger than the current KEKB machine. To exploit these new conditions and provide high precision measurements of the decay vertex of the B meson systems, a new silicon vertex detector will be operated in Belle. This new detector will consist of two layers of DEPFET Active Pixel Sensors as close as possible to the interaction point. DEPFET is a field effect transistor, with an additional deep implant underneath the channel's gate, integrated on a completely depleted bulk. This technology offers detection and an in-pixel amplification stage, while keeping low the power consumption. Under these conditions, thin sensors with small pixel size and low intrinsic noise are possible. In this article, an overview of the full system will be described, including the sensor, the front-end electronics and both the mechanical and thermal proposed solutions as well as the expected performance.

Abstract: We describe a new positron emission time-of-flight apparatus using liquid xenon. The detector is based in a liquid xenon scintillating cell. The cell shape and dimensions can be optimized depending on the intended application. In its simplest form, the liquid xenon scintillating cell is a box in which two faces are covered by silicon photomultipliers and the others by a reflecting material such as Teflon. It is a compact, homogenous and highly efficient detector which shares many of the desirable properties of monolithic crystals, with the added advantage of high yield and fast scintillation offered by liquid xenon. Our initial studies suggest that good energy and spatial resolution comparable with that achieved by lutetium oxyorthosilicate crystals can be obtained with a detector based in liquid xenon scintillating cells. In addition, the system can potentially achieve an excellent coincidence resolving time of better than 100 ps.

Abstract: We report on the spatial response characterization of large LaCl3(Ce) monolithic crystals optically coupled to 8 x 8 pixel silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) sensors. A systematic study has been carried out for 511 keV gamma-rays using three different crystal thicknesses of 10 mm, 20 mm and 30 mm, all of them with planar geometry and a base size of 50 x 50 mm(2). In this work we investigate and compare two different approaches for the determination of the main gamma-ray hit location. On one hand, methods based on the fit of an analytical model for the scintillation light distribution provide the best results in terms of linearity and field of view, with spatial resolutions close to similar to 1 mm FWHM. On the other hand, position reconstruction techniques based on neural networks provide similar linearity and field-of-view, becoming the attainable spatial resolution similar to 3 mm FWHM. For the third space coordinate z or depth-of-interaction we have implemented an inverse linear calibration approach based on the cross-section of the measured scintillation-light distribution at a certain height. The detectors characterized in this work are intended for the development of so-called Total Energy Detectors with Compton imaging capability (i-TED), aimed at enhanced sensitivity and selectivity measurements of neutron capture cross sections via the time-of-flight (TOF) technique.