MÖNCH, a small pitch, integrating hybrid pixel detector for X-ray applications

• Published in: Journal of instrumentation 2014-05, Vol.9 (5), p.C05015-C05015
• Main Authors: Dinapoli, R, Bergamaschi, A, Cartier, S, Greiffenberg, D, Johnson, I, Jungmann, J H, Mezza, D, Mozzanica, A, Schmitt, B, Shi, X, Tinti, G
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Charge; Detectors; Imaging; Instrumentation; Photons; Pixels; Spectra; X-rays
• ISSN: 1748-0221; 1748-0221
• DOI: 10.1088/1748-0221/9/05/C05015

PSI is developing several new detector families based on charge integration and analog readout (CI) to respond to the needs of X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs), where a signal up to ~10 super(4) photons impinging simultaneously on a pixel make single photon counting detectors unusable. MONCH is a novel hybrid silicon pixel detector where CI is combined with a challengingly small pixel size of 25 x 25 mu m super(2). CI enables the detector to process several incoming photon simultaneously in XFEL applications. In low flux experiments the analog information provided by single photons can be used either to obtain spectral information or to improve the position resolution by interpolation. In low gain mode they should provide single photon sensitivity (at 6-12 keV) as well as a reasonable dynamic range for such a small area (> 120 photons). The paper presents the MONCH project and first results obtained with the MONCH02 prototype.