The Medipix3 chips have been designed to permit spectroscopic imaging in highly segmented hybrid pixel detectors. Spectral degradation due to charge sharing in the sensor has been addressed by means of an architecture in which adjacent pixels communicate in the analog and digital domains on an event-by-event basis to reconstruct the deposited charge in a neighbourhood prior to the assignation of the hit to a single pixel. The Medipix3RX chip architecture is presented. The first results for the characterization of the chip with 300 μm thick Si sensors are given. ∼ 72e− r.m.s. noise and ∼ 40e− r.m.s. of threshold dispersion after chip equalization have been measured in Single Pixel Mode of operation. The homogeneity of the image in Charge Summing mode is comparable to the Single Pixel Mode image. This demonstrates both modes are suitable for X-ray imaging applications.

Free-electron lasers (FELs) present new challenges for camera development compared with conventional light sources. At SLAC a variety of technologies are being used to match the demands of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and to support a wide range of scientific applications. In this paper an overview of X-ray detector design requirements at FELs is presented and the various cameras in use at SLAC are described for the benefit of users planning experiments or analysts looking at data. Features and operation of the CSPAD camera, which is currently deployed at LCLS, are discussed, and the ePix family, a new generation of cameras under development at SLAC, is introduced.

Visual information processing is adapted to the statistics of natural visual stimuli, and these statistics depend to a large extent on the movements of an animal itself. To investigate such movements in freely walking blowflies, we measured the orientation and position of their head and thorax, with high spatial and temporal accuracy. Experiments were performed on Calliphora vicina, Lucilia cuprina and L. caesar. We found that thorax and head orientation of walking flies is typically different from the direction of walking, with differences of 45 degrees common. During walking, the head and the thorax turn abruptly, with a frequency of 5-10 Hz and angular velocities in the order of 1,000 degrees /s. These saccades are stereotyped: head and thorax start simultaneously, with the head turning faster, and finishing its turn before the thorax. The changes in position during walking are saccade-like as well, occurring synchronously, but on average slightly after the orientation saccades. Between orientation saccades the angular velocities are low and the head is held more stable than the thorax. We argue that the strategy of turning by saccades improves the performance of the visual system of blowflies.

Most experimental studies of cavitation in liquid water at negative pressures reported cavitation at tensions significantly smaller than those expected for homogeneous nucleation, suggesting that achievable tensions are limited by heterogeneous cavitation. We generated tension pulses with nanosecond rise times in water by reflecting cylindrical shock waves, produced by X-ray laser pulses, at the internal surface of drops of water. Depending on the X-ray pulse energy, a range of cavitation phenomena occurred, including the rupture and detachment, or spallation, of thin liquid layers at the surface of the drop. When spallation occurred, we evaluated that negative pressures below -100 MPa were reached in the drops. We model the negative pressures from shock reflection experiments using a nucleation-and-growth model that explains how rapid decompression could outrun heterogeneous cavitation in water, and enable the study of stretched water close to homogeneous cavitation pressures.

The Medipix3 chip is a hybrid pixel detector readout chip working in Single Photon Counting Mode. It has been developed with a new front-end architecture aimed at eliminating the spectral distortion produced by charge diffusion in highly segmented semiconductor detectors. In the new architecture charge deposited in overlapping clusters of four pixels is summed event-byevent and the incoming quantum is assigned as a single hit to the summing circuit with the biggest charge deposit (this mode of operation is called Charge Summing Mode (CSM)). In Single Pixel Mode (SPM) the charge reconstruction and the communication between neighbouring pixels is disabled. This is the operating mode in traditional detector systems. This paper presents the results of the characterization of the chip with electrical stimuli and radioactive sources.