Two-dimensional imaging detectors for structural biology with X-ray lasers

Abstract

Our ability to harness the advances in microelectronics over the past decade(s) for X-ray detection has resulted in significant improvements in the state of the art. Biology with X-ray free-electron lasers present daunting detector challenges: all of the photons arrive at the same time, and individual high peak power pulses must be read out shot-by-shot. Direct X-ray detection in silicon pixel detectors-monolithic or hybrid-are the standard for XFELs today. For structural biology, improvements are needed for today's 10-100 Hz XFELs, and further improvements are required for tomorrow's 10þ kHz XFELs. This article will discuss detector challenges, why they arise and ways to overcome them, along with the current state of the art.

The birth of a new field

“…Atomic resolution has so far been obtained from unknown structures only using nanocrystals (and near-atomic resolution in the FSS when small changes in a known structure are studied), so that a crucial area for development of the BioXFEL field is the development of new methods for growing nanocrystals (Kupitz et al [21], Caffrey et al [22], Gallat et al [23] and Stevenson et al [24]). When the study of the evolving damage processes (reviewed by Chapman et al [3]), diffraction physics (White [25]), simultaneous emission spectroscopy (Kern et al [15]) and detector development (Denes [26]) is added to this list of subfields, it will be seen that structure and dynamics in biology with XFELs is an extremely rich interdisciplinary field, now undergoing rapid innovation and creative development.…”

Mapping Enzyme Landscapes by Time-Resolved Crystallography with Synchrotron and X-Ray Free Electron Laser Light

“…The limitations of Laue-based approaches are being addressed by new methods. Time-resolved crystallography is currently enjoying a renaissance owing to a combination of new XFEL sources of exceptional brilliance (7), fast detectors (26,45), and serial crystallographic approaches that allow full data sets to be collected from a large number of small crystals (7,18). These technical developments have been mutually reinforcing.…”

X-ray imaging detectors for synchrotron and XFEL sources

“…A frame rate of the order of 1 kHz with 1 Mpixel, corresponding to a readout rate of 1 MHz, is thought to be the practical limit without degrading the noise level of about 5 electrons. To go beyond these trade-offs, new inventions such as an extremely parallel readout scheme with a pipeline architecture proposed by LBNL (Grace et al, 2013) are required (Denes, 2014). The proposed scheme is presented in Fig.…”