Scintillation materials play a crucial role wherever ionizing radiation or accelerated particle beams need to be monitored. There are increased requirements on them for example in accelerators in industry, electron beam detection in scanning electron microscopes, or in hybrid detectors for the new generation of medical imaging devices in positron emission tomography.
Application areas also include environmental radiation monitoring or various security technologies. New solid-state lasers, especially in the infrared region, are making a major contribution to the development of applications in medicine (ophthalmology, dermatology, aesthetic surgery), plasma diagnostics, remote sensing of the atmosphere and oceans, air pollution detection, distance measurement and target detection, and in emerging quantum communications.
The project led by the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering and industrial partners CRYTUR and Nuvia is expected to deepen the application potential of research organisations and industrial enterprises, as well as to bring specific material outputs directly usable in the innovative products of industrial partners.
On 1 September 2024, two trilateral partnerships consisting of both the academic institutions and an industrial partner start their activities being supported by the Programme Johannes Amos Comenius – Intersectoral Cooperation. The research will intensify the already existing mostly bilateral research collaboration and will continue to be conducted on the principle of mutual trust and benefit (win-win strategy). Emphasis is placed on the two-way transfer of knowledge, experience and know-how between research and industrial partners, which makes primary research more efficient and accelerates the transfer of applicable results to industrial practice.
"The project strengthens the abilities of all the involved entities to create and then effectively use the results of research and development in practice.The research organisations will benefit from obtaining practical data and feedback to verify the applicability and practical potential of research results, which will determine the further direction of oriented and subsequent applied research," says the main coordinator of the project, Professor Martin Nikl from FZU.
The academics also plan to use the contacts of the project's existing industrial partners to identify new application opportunities and to open up new possibilities for collaboration with other entities from industry. This can be illustrated by the ongoing development of a new class of single crystals of heavy perovskites for radioisotope radiometry in rocks in a trilateral collaboration between FZU, CRYTUR and Georadis.
On the other hand, industrial partners will gain direct access to information on current technological possibilities in research laboratories that can be used for further innovation and the applicability of research results.
The LASCIMAT project has received support from the Programme Johannes Amos Comenius – Intersectoral Cooperation and starts its activities on 1 September 2024. The Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences as a coordinator collaborates with the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering (academic partner) and CRYTUR and Nuvia (industrial partners). The project is a logical outcome of the long-standing collaboration in the above-mentioned consortium and will significantly contribute to its further expansion and deepening. The total project budget amounts almost to CZK 100 million for a period of 52 months.