Performance Evaluation of the Current Birmingham PEPT Cameras

Positron emission particle tracking (PEPT), a powerful technique for studying fluid and granular flows, has been developed at Birmingham over the last 30 years. In PEPT, a positron camera is used to detect the pairs of back-to-back photons emitted from positron annihilation. Accurate high-speed tracking of small tracer particles requires a positron camera with high sensitivity and data rate. In this paper, we compare the sensitivity and data rates obtained from the three principal cameras currently used at Birmingham. The recently constructed SuperPEPT and MicroPEPT systems have much higher sensitivity than the longstanding ADAC Forte and can generate data at much higher rates, greatly extending the potential for PEPT studies.

Automated summary

The article introduces a technique called positron emission particle tracking (PEPT), developed at Birmingham University for studying fluid and granular flows. The authors compare the sensitivity and data rates obtained from three different camera systems and find that the newly constructed SuperPEPT and MicroPEPT systems have higher sensitivity and can generate data at higher rates compared to the longstanding ADAC Forte system, significantly expanding the potential for PEPT studies.