XPIX

Development of imaging devices for X-rays in material science (collaboration between CPPM, ESRF/DAM and SOLEIL).

The high flux and the high brightness of third generation X-ray synchrotrons were not followed by equivalent progresses in the detector field.

The technology of hybrid pixels developed for the ATLAS high energy physics experiment at LHC offers several key features that help to fill this gap. A hybrid pixel detector is made of a matrix of pixels in which each pixel is assembled by bump bonding to a dedicated electronic circuit. One obtains high counting rate, extremely high dynamic range, single photon counting, energy selection and fast readout. This makes their use very attractive for X-ray imaging experiments in Material Science (powder diffraction, crystallography of proteins, drug characterisation...).

A family of hybrid pixel imagers tailored for crystallography experiments is under development at CPPM in collaboration with the DAM group (Diffraction and Abnormal Diffusion Multi-wavelengths) of the ESRF (Grenoble) and the detector group at the SOLEIL synchrotron facility in Saint-Aubin, close to Saclay. The detector part is either made of silicon or of Cd(Zn)Te. The electronics part is designed to ensure large dynamics for instantaneous (10^-2 up to 10⁸ photons/s/mm²) and integrated (10³⁰ photons) light intensities and an image acquisition time of about a millisecond.