Photon quantum entanglement in the MeV regime and its application in PET imaging

Abstract

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a widely-used imaging modality for medical research and clinical diagnosis. Here we demonstrate, through detailed experiments and simulations, an exploration of the benefits of exploiting the quantum entanglement of linear polarisation between the two positron annihilation photons utilised in PET. A new simulation, which includes the predicted influence of quantum entanglement on the interaction of MeV-scale photons with matter, is validated by comparison with experimental data from a cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) PET demonstrator apparatus. In addition, a modified setup enabled the first experimental constraint on entanglement loss for photons in the MeV regime. Quantum-entangled PET offers new methodologies to address key challenges in next generation imaging. As an indication of the potential benefits, we present a simple method to quantify and remove in-patient scatter and random backgrounds using only the quantum entanglement information in the PET events.

39 pages, 12 figures

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• Experimental realization of sub-shot-noise quantum imaging
• Imaging with a small number of photons
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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Positronium Physics and Biomedical Applications
• Entanglement of annihilation photons
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• Optimization of detector modules for measuring gamma-ray polarization in Positron Emission Tomography
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• Investigation of the spatial resolution of PET imaging system measuring polarization-correlated Compton events
• Probing arbitrary polarized photon pairs undergoing double Compton scatterings by a dedicated MC simulator validated with experimental data
• General Concurrence Percolation on Quantum Networks
• Quantum Error Channels in High Energetic Photonic Systems
• A reconciliation of the Pryce-Ward and Klein-Nishina statistics for semi-classical simulations of annihilation photons correlations
• QEDtool: A Python package for numerical quantum information in quantum electrodynamics
• Quantum Entanglement Degree, Mean Positronium Lifetime, and the $3\gamma$/$2\gamma$ Annihilation-Rate Ratio as Novel PET Biomarkers for Hypoxia -- Concept, Challenges, and Predictions
• Quantifying Quantum Correlations in Annihilation Photon Pairs under Compton Scattering