WP 2

In the field of X-ray spectroscopy there have been several initiatives in recent years to improve silicon detectors especially in the developments of arrays of Silicon Drift Detectors. This is in stark contrast to the very little effort which has been devoted to the improvement of germanium detectors.

Germanium detectors are a very important class of instruments for X-ray spectroscopy because they enable to detect efficiently photons of considerable higher energy with respect to silicon detectors. In addition, in applications such as fluorescence detectors for absorption spectroscopy (XAFS) germanium detectors do not show artefacts due to features such as the escape peak interfering with interesting peaks being measured.

The aim of this work package is to push germanium detectors performance beyond the state-of-the-art, and for instance, enhance the throughput per unit area for X-ray spectroscopy by developing new multi-element monolithic detectors with reduced element size. Shrinking the element size entails challenges such as the development of miniaturized front-end electronics and the use of advanced pulse processors to avoid collimators in front of the elements.

The work package will develop a prototype with a limited number of channels but the technology developed within this project will enable to scale up the channels in future developments.