In early March, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, Geneva, Switzerland) signed an agreement on the establishment of an international research organization Medipix-4 and JINR became a member of it.

The goal of Medipix is chips family development to create the pixel detectors of ionizing radiation. Such detectors are called “smart”, because they are not just registering radiation, but also making signal preprocessing, which might be sometimes quite complicated.

Medipix main feature is that its detectors not only fix the presence of certain radiation sources, but also determine the energy of the particles produced by them. This allows X-ray images of ultrahigh quality, as well as to determine the chemical composition of the samples on the tomograms. It also helps to examine the microstructure of tissues of living organisms and to determine the fraction of different materials in them.

Meanwhile, this area is not new to the JINR, which carries out research with Medipix detectors since 2008. One of the products of these developments became a system for monitoring the state of the background radiation in the ATLAS detector, operating within the framework of the Large Hadron Collider.

Flower X-ray image obtained by a Medipix detector