Backside-illuminated scientific CMOS detector for soft X-ray resonant scattering and ptychography

Kewin Desjardins; Kadda Medjoubi; Maurizio Sacchi; Horia Popescu; Roland Gaudemer; Rachid Belkhou; Stefan Stanescu; Sufal Swaraj; Adrien Besson; Jaianth Vijayakumar; Stéphanie Pautard; Arafat Noureddine; Pascal Mercère; Paulo Da Silva; Fabienne Orsini; Claude Menneglier; Nicolas Jaouen

doi:10.1107/S160057752001262X

Backside-illuminated scientific CMOS detector for soft X-ray resonant scattering and ptychography

J Synchrotron Radiat. 2020 Nov 1;27(Pt 6):1577-1589. doi: 10.1107/S160057752001262X. Epub 2020 Oct 26.

Authors

Kewin Desjardins¹, Kadda Medjoubi¹, Maurizio Sacchi¹, Horia Popescu¹, Roland Gaudemer¹, Rachid Belkhou¹, Stefan Stanescu¹, Sufal Swaraj¹, Adrien Besson¹, Jaianth Vijayakumar¹, Stéphanie Pautard¹, Arafat Noureddine¹, Pascal Mercère¹, Paulo Da Silva¹, Fabienne Orsini¹, Claude Menneglier¹, Nicolas Jaouen¹

Affiliation

¹ Synchrotron SOLEIL, Saint-Aubin, Gif-sur-Yvette, 91192, France.

PMID: 33147182
DOI: 10.1107/S160057752001262X

Abstract

The impressive progress in the performance of synchrotron radiation sources is nowadays driven by the so-called `ultimate storage ring' projects which promise an unprecedented improvement in brightness. Progress on the detector side has not always been at the same pace, especially as far as soft X-ray 2D detectors are concerned. While the most commonly used detectors are still based on microchannel plates or CCD technology, recent developments of CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor)-type detectors will play an ever more important role as 2D detectors in the soft X-ray range. This paper describes the capabilities and performance of a camera equipped with a newly commercialized backside-illuminated scientific CMOS (sCMOS-BSI) sensor, integrated in a vacuum environment, for soft X-ray experiments at synchrotron sources. The 4 Mpixel sensor reaches a frame rate of up to 48 frames s^-1 while matching the requirements for X-ray experiments in terms of high-intensity linearity (>98%), good spatial homogeneity (<1%), high charge capacity (up to 80 ke^-), and low readout noise (down to 2 e^- r.m.s.) and dark current (3 e^- per second per pixel). Performance evaluations in the soft X-ray range have been carried out at the METROLOGIE beamline of the SOLEIL synchrotron. The quantum efficiency, spatial resolution (24 line-pairs mm^-1), energy resolution (<100 eV) and radiation damage versus the X-ray dose (<600 Gy) have been measured in the energy range from 40 to 2000 eV. In order to illustrate the capabilities of this new sCMOS-BSI sensor, several experiments have been performed at the SEXTANTS and HERMES soft X-ray beamlines of the SOLEIL synchrotron: acquisition of a coherent diffraction pattern from a pinhole at 186 eV, a scattering experiment from a nanostructured Co/Cu multilayer at 767 eV and ptychographic imaging in transmission at 706 eV.

Keywords: 2D soft X-ray detector; X-ray detectors; back-illuminated CMOS; coherent diffraction; ptychography; quantum efficiency; radiation hardness; sCMOS camera; soft X-ray scattering.