Revision 1

Accepted · first revision · record

Title: Fundamental bound on scintillation timing
Plain: Light arrives at the sensor at random times, which sets a floor on how precisely the arrival can be timed. The exact floor for realistic detectors is not established.
Precise: Derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (the minimum variance any unbiased estimator can reach) on timing precision for a scintillation detector including non-exponential rise and decay, position-dependent light transport inside the crystal, photodetector single-photon time response and dark counts, and construct an estimator reaching it. An answer is the bound as a function of photon yield, rise time, decay time and transit-time spread, plus a realizable estimator.
Settled by: A derivation with an estimator demonstrated in simulation and on bench data to approach the bound.
Kind: well-posed
Answer type: proof
References: (empty)
Literature status: partially-resolved
Status note: Bounds exist for simplified emission models since Seifert, van Dam and Schaart (2012); the realistic transport case was not closed as of 2025.
Posed since: 2012