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PSD Innovation Network
As you learned on May 5, the UChicago Physical Sciences Division Innovation Network is looking for your ideas and assistance in translating PSD faculty-directed fundamental research into application in existing or emerging markets. We will ask for your input and feedback quarterly on a specific faculty member's research.
Warm regards,
Adele Goldberg, SM'68, PhD'73
Chair, University of Chicago PSD Innovation Network

Henry Frisch’s Large-Area Picosecond Photodetector Systems
Henry FrischProfessor Henry Frisch is the leader of a multi-institutional effort to develop high-speed, large-area, and low-cost photodetectors. His work is motivated by the extreme demands of high-energy particle physics experiments. Frisch was a founding member of the team that discovered the top quark at Fermilab in 1995. Future progress in this area will require detectors capable of detecting photons with picosecond timing resolution over detectors tens to hundreds of square meters in size.
The same detectors can be used in applications ranging from medical imaging to cargo scanning. In particular, large picosecond detectors would be of use for positron-emission tomography (PET) imaging. PET instruments with better time resolution and larger coverage would provide higher image quality than existing PET systems and reduce the patient's exposure to radiation. After four years of R & D, Frisch is embarking in a new direction to bring the detectors to market by working with small US companies through the US Department of Energy's Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer program.
Frisch has access to remarkable facilities and talent at UChicago in the Electronics Development Group at the Enrico Fermi Institute (EFI), mechanical engineering and machining through the PSD Engineering Center, and collaborators with unique facilities at Argonne and Fermilab. The detectors themselves are made of plate glass and are very simple, with only eight parts. The company that will build the detectors is by necessity conservative and is planning on a conventional clean-room-based assembly. Frisch is designing a small fabrication facility that could be built in the EFI that exploits the simplicity of the design and the availability of talented students and staff to make the modules quickly and cheaply (he calls this strategy "the portfolio of risk"--a conservative industrial effort using decades-old technologies and a parallel academic data-driven effort using modern characterization facilities that can focus on the R & D needed to advance beyond state of the art).
The PSD Innovation Network is interested in resources to help Frisch continue pushing the technical frontier in a way that will be commercially viable. A list of such resources to support designing a photodetector fabrication facility is given on the right.
Visit the Large-Area Picosecond Photo-Detector Project (LAPPD) for more information on the collaboration and its work, including image, documentation, and figure libraries, as well as a list of workshops.
Do you have access to clean, used, ultra-high vacuum equipment?
Frisch has found partial funding from the federal government for the development of the first phase of the facility and is working on the remainder. Hardware can be acquired as an in-kind donation, at auction, or by sale. Specifically, he is looking to acquire the following items. Any leads, or more, would be greatly appreciated.
1.A SS-glove box with partial pressures of water and oxygen below parts per million
2.Clean UHV pump stations (~350-400 l/sec) with dry roughing pumps
3.Gate valves capable of handling a 'tile' (9" wide)
4.Vacuum transfer mechanisms with readout (need one linear mechanism with a 34' travel plus several smaller ones)
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