Characterization and performance evaluation of the XSPA-500k detector using synchrotron radiation

Abstract

Hybrid photon counting (HPC) detectors are widely used at both synchrotron facilities and in-house laboratories. The features of HPC detectors, such as no readout noise, high dynamic range, high frame rate, excellent point spread function, no blurring etc. along with fast data acquisition, provide a high-performance detector with a low detection limit and high sensitivity. Several HPC detector systems have been developed around the world. A number of them are commercially available and used in academia and industry. One of the important features of an HPC detector is a fast readout speed. Most HPC detectors can easily achieve over 1000 frames s−1, one or two orders of magnitude faster than conventional CCD detectors. Nevertheless, advanced scientific challenges require ever faster detectors in order to study dynamical phenomena in matter. The XSPA-500k detector can achieve 56 kframes s−1 continuously, without dead-time between frames. Using `burst mode', a special mode of the UFXC32k ASIC, the frame rate reaches 1 000 000 frames s−1. XSPA-500k was fully evaluated at the Metrology beamline at Synchrotron SOLEIL (France) and its readout speed was confirmed by tracking the synchrotron bunch time structure. The uniformity of response, modulation transfer function, linearity, energy resolution and other performance metrics were also verified either with fluorescence X-rays illuminating the full area of the detector or with the direct beam.

Robotic Pendant Drop: Containerless Liquid for μs-resolved, AI-executable XPCS

“…The transmitted x-ray scattering intensities were collected 7.8 m downstream from the sample using Rigaku XSPA-500k, a 1024×512 pixelated single-photon-counting detector with 76 μm pixel size 48 . XSPA has three acquisition modes: Long Mode, Continuous Mode, and Burst Mode.…”

Direct measurement of Stokes–Einstein diffusion of Cowpea mosaic virus with 19 µs-resolved XPCS

“…The transmitted coherent X-ray scattering intensities were collected 8 m downstream of the sample using X-ray Seamless Pixel Array 500k (XSPA-500k), a single-photon-counting detector with a pixel size of 76 mm and tunable frame rate up to 52 kHz (Nakaye et al, 2021). For the current study, the frame rate was fixed at 52 kHz and each measurement consisted of 100 000 detector frames collected continuously over a total duration of 1.92 s. Due to the extremely low scattering rate of CPMV, each individual measurement of 100 000 frames was further repeated 14328 times for sample A, 7554 times for sample B and 13 054 times for sample C, resulting in approximately one billion detector frames for each sample condition.…”

pyXPCSviewer: an open-source interactive tool for X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy visualization and analysis

“…Files can be added, removed and sorted in the target box that lists the files for visualization. The right panel contains the visualization modules, organized in tabs -a 2-D scattering pattern is displayed in this figure . a maximum continuous frame rate of 52 kHz (Nakaye et al, 2021). After a valid working directory is set, the source panel lists the available files.…”