PETALO: Time-Of-Flight PET with Liquid Xenon

Liquid xenon has several attractive features, which make it suitable for applications to nuclear medicine, such as high scintillation yield and fast scintillation decay time. in this talk, I will describe the PETALO concept (Positron Emission Tof Apparatus with Liquid xenOn) , a novel idea, which combines liquid xenon scintillating cells and silicon photomultipliers for the readout. A first Monte Carlo investigation has pointed out that this technology would provide an excellent intrinsic time resolution, which opens the possibility of measuring the Time-Of-Flight with high efficiency. I will also explore the possibility of exploiting both scintillation and Cherenkov light for a high-sensitivity TOF-PET.