Detector modeling is becoming more and more critical for the development of new instruments in scientific space missions and ground-based experiments. Modeling tools are often developed from scratch by each individual project and not necessarily shared for reuse by a wider community. To foster knowledge transfer, reusability, and reliability in the instrumentation community, we developed Pyxel, a framework for the simulation of scientific detectors and instruments. Pyxel is an open-source and collaborative project, based on Python, developed as an easy-to-use tool that can host and pipeline any kind of detector effect model. Recently, Pyxel has achieved a new milestone: the public release and launch of version 1.0, which simplified third-party contributions and improved ease of use even further. Since its launch, Pyxel has been experiencing a growing user community and is being used to simulate a variety of detectors. We give a tour of Pyxel's version 1.0 changes and new features, including a new interface, parallel computing, and new detectors and models. We continue with an example of using Pyxel as a tool for model optimization and calibration. Finally, we describe an example of how Pyxel and its features can be used to develop a full-scale end-to-end instrument simulator.
The Atmospheric Remote‐Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large‐survey (ARIEL) space mission is dedicated to the study of the exoplanets' atmosphere. To do so, the payload module is made of two instruments. The ARIEL InfraRed Spectrometer instruments is one them, it will perform spectroscopic measurements from the near‐infrared domain to the long‐wave infrared domain. The instrument relies on the use of two H1RG detectors. During early phases of instrument development dark current measurements have been done on an 8 m cutoff detector operated in window mode. These measurements revealed an unexpected level of dark current. This observation triggered a joint series of tests at the European Space Agency technical center and at the Astrophysics Department of the Atomic Energy Commission. As demonstrated in this paper, the excess of dark current originates from the collection, by the photosenstive layer, of light emitted by the source follower transistor of the pixel unit cell. This effect is referred as glow. Based on experimental results, this glow is studied as a function of the detector operating conditions (temperature, biases, timing diagram). These results also show that for the range of operating temperatures considered, the dark current performance of the detector is limited by the glow.
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