{"ID":5554303,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-02T02:11:27.934456424Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-04T16:01:31.385776155Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01123","arxiv_id":"2607.01123","title":"Plenoptic imaging of particle interactions in scintillation detectors","abstract":"Accurate 3D localization of radiation interactions in scintillation detectors is essential for nuclear and particle physics, safeguards, and medical imaging, but remains difficult in light-starved regimes with limited photon statistics. We present PRISM, a multifocal plenoptic imaging system designed for millimeter-scale 3D position reconstruction in a single-volume scintillator. PRISM uses a multifocal microlens array with diverse focal lengths and high effective numerical aperture to balance photon collection with spatial and depth encoding. A Cram'er--Rao lower bound analysis shows that the multifocal design improves axial sensitivity over conventional unifocal plenoptic systems under photon-limited conditions. We build a prototype system, calibrate its optical response with a tunable light source, and form photon-limited measurements with $\\mathcal{O}(100)$ detected photons. For sparse single-vertex events, we reconstruct interaction locations using an Alternating Descent Conditional Gradient-inspired algorithm and demonstrate an average 3D localization error of approximately 1 mm. We also provide an initial evaluation of double-vertex events, showing that localization improves as the axial separation between interactions increases. These results demonstrate that multifocal plenoptic imaging can mitigate the traditional trade-off between light collection and spatial resolution, providing a photon-efficient approach to 3D reconstruction in scintillation detectors and a foundation for future multi-scattering event reconstruction.","short_abstract":"Accurate 3D localization of radiation interactions in scintillation detectors is essential for nuclear and particle physics, safeguards, and medical imaging, but remains difficult in light-starved regimes with limited photon statistics. We present PRISM, a multifocal plenoptic imaging system designed for millimeter-sca...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01123","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.01123v1","authors":"[\"Xiang Dai\",\"Chi-Jui Ho\",\"Kevin Tandi\",\"Chang Lee\",\"Alex Bocchieri\",\"David Parra\",\"Forrest Peterson\",\"Talha Sultan\",\"Felicia Sutanto\",\"Andreas Velten\",\"Jingke Xu\",\"Nicholas Antipa\"]","published":"2026-07-01T16:10:13Z","proceeding":"physics.ins-det","tasks":"[\"physics.ins-det\",\"eess.SP\",\"physics.optics\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}