Current and future detector developments at the Swiss Light Source

The detector group of the Swiss Light Source (SLS) at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) has a long history of x-ray detector developments for synchrotrons. Initially these detectors were all single photon counting systems. In the last years the focus at PSI was moving towards charge integrating systems mainly driven by the detector needs for the upcoming XFELs. Charge integrating systems however also solve some of the problems of single photon counting systems. Charge integrating systems have an almost infinite linear count rate capability, allow systems with smallest pixel sizes and for low photon energies. In this presentation we give an overview of the detector developments at PSI and focus on Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger. Eiger is a single photon counting system specifically developed for high frame rates. It has a 75 micron pixel size and can run at frame rates up to 24 kHz. A 9M Eiger detector will be installed in a few months at the cSAXS beamline of the SLS. Jungfrau uses the same sensor as Eiger (about 4cm x 8 cm with a pixel size of 75 microns). It has a charge integrating architecture with dynamic gain switching to achieve a dynamic range of 10^4 photons (at 12 keV). With a frame rate of up to 2 kHz Jungfrau is currently being developed for applications at both XFELs and synchrotrons. 16M Jungfrau detectors are foreseen at the SwissFEL. Mönch is currently a research project. A first prototype with 160x160 pixels and a pixel size of 25 microns was designed and is currently characterised. It offers the smallest pixel size of current hybrid pixel detectors and also has a very low noise allowing hybrid pixel detectors to be used down to about 400eV. We present measurement results for Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger and give an outlook on future possible systems.

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Development of single photon counting detectors at the Swiss Light Source

Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A Accelerators Spectrometers Detectors and Associated Equipment ◽

10.1016/j.nima.2003.11.051 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 518 (1-2) ◽

pp. 436-439 ◽

Cited By ~ 46

Author(s):

B. Schmitt ◽

Ch. Brönnimann ◽

E.F. Eikenberry ◽

G. Hülsen ◽

H. Toyokawa ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Light Source ◽

Single Photon ◽

Photon Counting ◽

Single Photon Counting ◽

Swiss Light Source ◽

Photon Counting Detectors

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Measurement of synchrotron-radiation-excited Kossel patterns

Journal of Synchrotron Radiation ◽

10.1107/s1600577515019037 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 214-218 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

G. Bortel ◽

G. Faigel ◽

M. Tegze ◽

A. Chumakov

Keyword(s):

High Resolution ◽

Dynamic Range ◽

Structural Information ◽

Photon Counting ◽

Spot Size ◽

Low Noise ◽

X Rays ◽

Technical Problems ◽

Pixel Detectors ◽

Exciting Beam

Kossel line patterns contain information on the crystalline structure, such as the magnitude and the phase of Bragg reflections. For technical reasons, most of these patterns are obtained using electron beam excitation, which leads to surface sensitivity that limits the spatial extent of the structural information. To obtain the atomic structure in bulk volumes, X-rays should be used as the excitation radiation. However, there are technical problems, such as the need for high resolution, low noise, large dynamic range, photon counting, two-dimensional pixel detectors and the small spot size of the exciting beam, which have prevented the widespread use of Kossel pattern analysis. Here, an experimental setup is described, which can be used for the measurement of Kossel patterns in a reasonable time and with high resolution to recover structural information.

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Pixel readout IC for CdTe detectors operating in single photon counting mode with interpixel communication

Journal of Instrumentation ◽

10.1088/1748-0221/17/01/c01036 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 17 (01) ◽

pp. C01036

Author(s):

P. Grybos ◽

R. Kleczek ◽

P. Kmon ◽

A. Krzyzanowska ◽

P. Otfinowski ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Integrated Circuit ◽

Single Photon ◽

Photon Counting ◽

Recognition Algorithm ◽

Total Charge ◽

Readout Integrated Circuit ◽

Single Photon Counting ◽

X Ray ◽

Pixel Detectors ◽

Photon Counting Mode

Abstract This paper presents a readout integrated circuit (IC) of pixel architecture called MPIX (Multithreshold PIXels), designed for CdTe pixel detectors used in X-ray imaging applications. The MPIX IC area is 9.6 mm × 20.3 mm and it is designed in a CMOS 130 nm process. The IC core is a matrix of 96 × 192 square-shaped pixels of 100 µm pitch. Each pixel contains a fast analog front-end followed by four independently working discriminators and four 12-bit ripple counters. Such pixel architecture allows photon processing one by one and selecting the X-ray photons according to their energy (X-ray colour imaging). To fit the different range of applications the MPIX IC has 8 possible different gain settings, and it can process the X-ray photons of energy up to 154 keV. The MPIX chip is bump-bonded to the CdTe 1.5 mm thick pixel sensor with a pixel pitch of 100 µm. To deal with the charge sharing effect coming from a thick semiconductor pixel sensor, multithreshold pattern recognition algorithm is implemented in the readout IC. The implemented algorithm operates both in the analog domain (to recover the total charge spread between neighboring pixels, when a single X-ray photon hits the border of the pixel) and in the digital domain (to allocate a hit position to a single pixel).

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