ABSTRACT
New scintillator production processes and advances in nanotechnologies, in particular in the domain of photonics crystals and nanocrystals, open interesting perspectives for the development of new detector concepts capable of delivering much richer information about x- or gamma-ray energy deposition. They are based on metamaterials to simultaneously record with high precision the maximum amount of information on the cascade conversion process, such as its direction, the spatial distribution of the energy deposition, and its composition. Photonics crystals are usually made of a block of transparent dielectric material that contains a number of tiny air holes arranged in a lattice pattern. The development of photonics crystal fibers is a very active field in modern photonics as the market perspectives on this segment are large for telecommunications and chip-to-chip interconnect for highly intergrated electronics. One interesting application of photonic crystals concerns the coupling of optical propagation modes to extraction modes at the interface between two media with different indices of refraction.
