In the present article a new diagnostic device in the soft x-ray range, for magnetic fusion plasmas, is proposed based on a gas electron multiplier detector with 2.5x2.5 cm active area, equipped with a true two-dimensional readout system. The readout printed circuit board, designed for these experiments, has 128 pads. Each pad is 2 mm square and covers a roughly circular area. The operational conditions of the detector are settled to work in the x-ray range 3-15 keV at very high counting rates, with a linear response up to 2 MHz/pixel. This limitation is due to the electronic dead time. Images of a wrench and two pinholes were done at rates of 2.5 MHz/pixel with a powerful x-ray laboratory source showing an excellent imaging capability. Finally preliminary measurements of x-ray emission from a magnetic fusion plasma were performed on the Frascati tokamak upgrade experiment. The system was able to image the plasma with a wide dynamic range (more than a factor of 100), with a sampling frequency of 20 kHz and with counting rates up to 4 MHz/pixel, following the changes of the x-ray plasma emissivity due to additional radio frequency heating. The spatial resolution and imaging properties of this detector have been studied in this work for conditions of high counting rates and high gain, with the detector fully illuminated by very intense x-ray sources (laboratory tube and tokamak plasma). (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics
We report recent results from the development and testing of two types of micropattern gas detectorsFmicro-strip gas chambers and GEM-based devices with two types of pixel read-out. Thirty-two micro-strip gas chambers were tested in a high intensity hadron beam as a milestone for CERN's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. The detectors were operated with voltage settings corresponding to 98% hit detection efficiency at CMS for a total high intensity exposure period of 493 h. All of the requirements expected by the milestoneFgain stability, number of lost strips, spark rate, etc.Fwere met, with wide margins. In a separate investigation, we have coupled PCB pixel read-out planes to GEM foils. In one case, 2 mm  2 mm pixels were fanned out to individual discriminators and scalers to provide very fast (2 MHz/pixel) read-out; this system has been used as an imaging device to provide diagnostic information in fusion experiments. The second type of device used smaller pixels (200 mm squares) and a Flash-ADC read-out system to reconstruct individual photoelectron tracks. The angular distribution of the tracks allows the polarisation direction of polarised X-ray sources to be identified, with possible applications for future space experiments studying celestial X-ray emissions. r
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