OptoTracker project proposal

The project OptoTracker aims to investigate a new approach to track charged particles in a scintillating material, by using the optical signal. Our idea is to reconstruct the trajectory of a charged particle by collecting the scintillation light emitted along the path with pixelized photo-detectors. This would permit to obtain an image of the track, similarly to what is done in a photographic camera. Full 3D reconstruction is performed by using both the charge distribution and the hit time information folded in a sophisticated reconstruction algorithm. This solution, compared to "traditional" tracking methods, exploits the fastest information carrier within a material: the light. Therefore, an optical tracking detector would be intrinsically capable of sustaining a very high interaction rate. Moreover, the intrinsic resolution would not be limited by carriers diffusion, as happens in charge-transport based detectors. This new technology could have a very large impact both on beam experiments, thanks to the possible increase in the acquisition rate, and in rare-physics experiments (double-$\beta$ decay, dark-matter searches, neutrino oscillation searches), where the enhanced particle-id and directionality capability can provide significant background reduction. This project has been presented to the INFN-Gruppo 5 call for young scientists in 2014, with positive result. It has been founded for the years 2015-2016.