U. Pedersen

I12: the Joint Engineering, Environment and Processing (JEEP) beamline at Diamond Light Source

JEEP is a high-energy (50–150 keV) multi-purpose beamline offering polychromatic and monochromatic modes. It can accommodate large samples and experimental rigs, enabling in situ studies using radiography, tomography, energy-dispersive diffraction, monochromatic and white-beam two-dimensional diffraction/scattering and small-angle X-ray scattering.

Excalibur: A three million pixels photon counting area detector for coherent diffraction imaging based on the Medipix3 ASIC

A three million pixels photon counting area detector for the coherent diffraction imaging beam line (113) of Diamond Light Source has been developed by a joint team of Diamond and STFC staff. The detector is the state of the art of X-ray detection technology since it exploits the latest generation of Medipix ASICs family that introduced a number of innovations. The specifications required by the beam line represented a severe challenge to all of the components of the detector. The frame rate of Excalibur is up to 1,000 frames per second when stored in local RAM or up to 100 frames per second when streamed to storage. Tests with an X-ray set show the imaging capabilities of the detector as well as the data acquisition speed.

Detector Developments at DESY

With the increased brilliance of state-of-the-art synchrotron radiation sources and the advent of free-electron lasers (FELs) enabling revolutionary science with EUV to X-ray photons comes an urgent need for suitable photon imaging detectors. Requirements include high frame rates, very large dynamic range, single-photon sensitivity with low probability of false positives and (multi)-megapixels. At DESY, one ongoing development project - in collaboration with RAL/STFC, Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, Diamond, and Pohang Accelerator Laboratory - is the CMOS-based soft X-ray imager PERCIVAL. PERCIVAL is a monolithic active-pixel sensor back-thinned to access its primary energy range of 250 eV to 1 keV with target efficiencies above 90%. According to preliminary specifications, the roughly 10 cm × 10 cm, 3.5k × 3.7k monolithic sensor will operate at frame rates up to 120 Hz (commensurate with most FELs) and use multiple gains within 27 µm pixels to measure 1 to ∼100000 (500 eV) simultaneously arriving photons. DESY is also leading the development of the AGIPD, a high-speed detector based on hybrid pixel technology intended for use at the European XFEL. This system is being developed in collaboration with PSI, University of Hamburg, and University of Bonn. The AGIPD allows single-pulse imaging at 4.5 MHz frame rate into a 352-frame buffer, with a dynamic range allowing single-photon detection and detection of more than 10000 photons at 12.4 keV in the same image. Modules of 65k pixels each are configured to make up (multi)megapixel cameras. This review describes the AGIPD and the PERCIVAL concepts and systems, including some recent results and a summary of their current status. It also gives a short overview over other FEL-relevant developments where the Photon Science Detector Group at DESY is involved.

PERCIVAL: The design and characterisation of a CMOS image sensor for direct detection of low-energy X-rays

Free-Electron Lasers and Synchrotrons are rapidly increasing in brilliance. This has led a requirement of large dynamic range and high frame rate sensors that is now being fulfilled by the PERCVIAL CMOS imager for direct X-ray detection developed at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Utilising a lateral overflow pixel and back-side illumination, PERCIVAL simultaneously achieves low-noise single-photon detection and high full well up to 107 e-, all while maintaining a frame rate of 120Hz. PERCIVAL is currently in test structure stage, and will be produced in 2 Mpixel and 13 Mpixel “waferscale” variants in 2015.

On the Charge Collection Efficiency of the PERCIVAL Detector

The PERCIVAL soft X-ray imager is being developed by DESY, RAL, Elettra, DLS, and PAL to address the challenges at high brilliance Light Sources such as new-generation Synchrotrons and Free Electro ...

Report on recent results of the PERCIVAL soft X-ray imager

The PERCIVAL (Pixelated Energy Resolving CMOS Imager, Versatile And Large) soft X-ray 2D imaging detector is based on stitched, wafer-scale sensors possessing a thick epi-layer, which together with back-thinning and back-side illumination yields elevated quantum efficiency in the photon energy range of 125–1000 eV. Main application fields of PERCIVAL are foreseen in photon science with FELs and synchrotron radiation. This requires high dynamic range up to 105 ph @ 250 eV paired with single photon sensitivity with high confidence at moderate frame rates in the range of 10–120 Hz. These figures imply the availability of dynamic gain switching on a pixel-by-pixel basis and a highly parallel, low noise analog and digital readout, which has been realized in the PERCIVAL sensor layout. Different aspects of the detector performance have been assessed using prototype sensors with different pixel and ADC types. This work will report on the recent test results performed on the newest chip prototypes with the improved pixel and ADC architecture. For the target frame rates in the 10–120 Hz range an average noise floor of 14e− has been determined, indicating the ability of detecting single photons with energies above 250 eV. Owing to the successfully implemented adaptive 3-stage multiple-gain switching, the integrated charge level exceeds 4 10^6 e− or 57000 X-ray photons at 250 eV per frame at 120 Hz. For all gains the noise level remains below the Poisson limit also in high-flux conditions. Additionally, a short overview over the updates on an oncoming 2 Mpixel (P2M) detector system (expected at the end of 2016) will be reported.

Feasibility study of PERCIVAL Data Acquisition Backend Architecture

The PERCIVAL soft-X-ray (250 eV 1 keV) image detector project is a collaboration between DESY, STFC, Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste and Diamond Light Source. The objective of the project is to develop a back-thinned CMOS detector which outperforms present soft-X ray image detector technology, in terms of sensor size, noise, dynamic range and frame rate. The size of this 13M pixel imager associated with its 120 frames per second frame rate impose very challenging requirements to the Data Acquisition Backend of the system. A DAQ backend system architecture, using a commercial deep-buffer switch to rearrange image data streams coming from different regions of the sensor via several 10Gbps Ethernet links has been proposed to reassemble image frames. Real-time data processing is to be performed on multiple, parallel commodity compute nodes. This contribution to the conference reports on benchmarking tests performed as a feasibility study, and presents the resulting recommendations for the system architecture of the PERCIVAL detector DAQ backend. The feasibility study covered three key issues: Reliably moving data in UDP packets from multiple 10Gbps Ethernet links from the DAQ front-end electronics to commodity compute nodes; Real-time processing on the compute nodes; and finally streaming data to a central parallel storage system.

Experimental characterization of the PERCIVAL soft X-ray detector

Considerable interest has been manifested for the use of high-brilliance X-ray synchrotron sources and X-ray Free-Electron Lasers for the investigation of samples.