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The PERCIVAL detector is a CMOS imager designed for the soft X-ray regime at photon sources. Although still in its final development phase, it has recently seen its first user experiments: ptychography at a free-electron laser, holographic imaging at a storage ring and preliminary tests on X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy. The detector performed remarkably well in terms of spatial resolution achievable in the sample plane, owing to its small pixel size, large active area and very large dynamic range; but also in terms of its frame rate, which is significantly faster than traditional CCDs. In particular, it is the combination of these features which makes PERCIVAL an attractive option for soft X-ray science.

14th International Conference on Synchrotron radiation Instrumentation, (SRI 2021), Hamburg, Germany, 28 Mar 2022 - 1 Apr 2022; Journal of physics / Conference Series 2380(1), 012093 (2022). doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2380/1/012093, An X-ray imager is being developed for use in diffraction-limited Synchrotron Rings and Continuous Wave Free Electron Lasers. The imager is named CoRDIA (COntinuous Readout Digitising Imager Array) and aims at achieving continuous operation at a frame rate in excess of 100kHz. Other goals include single-photon sensitivity at 12 keV (or below), a full well in excess of 10k photon/pixel/image, and a 100μm pixel pitch. The detector ASIC will be compatible with multiple sensor materials to cover different energy ranges. Exploratory prototypes of the readout ASIC (basic circuital blocks) have been manufactured in in TSMC 65nm technology: they are presenltly under test., Published by IOP Publ., Bristol

High brilliance synchrotrons and FELs require high performing detector systems to realise their full potential. High dynamic range, low noise and high frame rate are all of great importance. In this paper we present first optical characterization results of the P2M CMOS sensor, designed for soft X-ray detection at such facilities. Previous work is summarised and an overview of the sensor is presented. Test results for the sensor’s column-parallel ADC and readout chain are presented, and first test results for the pixel acquired using the Photon Transfer Curve (PTC) method are shown. Finally, an outline of future work is provided.

2019 26th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (ICECS), Genoa, Italy, 27 Nov 2019 - 29 Nov 2019; ... IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems proceedings 51, 50 (2019). doi:10.1109/ICECS46596.2019.8964996, High brilliance synchrotrons and Free Electron Lasers (FELs) require high performing detector systems to realise their full potential. High dynamic range, low noise and high frame rate are all of great importance. In this paper we describe the P2M CMOS sensor, designed for soft X-ray detection at such facilities. We refer to previous work on test devices demonstrating a noise of 5Me- and quantum efficiency of >80% at 400eV (and with good sensitivity even below this value). Initial test results on the first Front Side Illuminated (FSI) 2 Megapixel device are also presented, and an outline of future work is described., Published by Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers, New York, N.Y.

Nuclear astrophysics presents an extraordinary scientific potential for the study of the most powerful sources and the most violent events in the Universe. But in order to take full advantage of this potential, telescopes should be at least an order of magnitude more sensitive than present technologies. Today, Laue lenses have demonstrated their capability of focusing gamma-rays in the 100 keV–1 MeV domain, enabling the possibility of building a new generation of instruments for which sensitive area is decoupled from collecting area. Thus we have now the opportunity of dramatically increase the signal/background ratio and hence improve significantly the sensitivity. With a lens, the best detector is no longer the largest possible within a mission envelope. The point spread function of a Laue lens measures a few centimeters in diameter, but the field of view is limited by the detector size. Requirements for a focal plane instrument are presented in the context of the Gamma-Ray Imager mission (proposed to European Space Agency, ESA in the framework of the first Cosmic Vision AO): a 15–20 cm a side finely pixellated detector capable of Compton events reconstruction seems to be optimal, giving polarization and background rejection capabilities and 30 arcsec of angular resolution within a field of view of 5 arc min.

The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne telescope based on the 3D-positioning germanium detectors. It is designed to study astrophysical sources of gamma-ray emission in the energy range of 0.2 MeV to 10 MeV. The data readout system of NCT is designed to amplify, digitize and collect signals from a germanium detector according to a certain trigger scheme. It also has an interface to the NCT flight computer to receive commands and transfer data. This paper contains the design and the scientific test result of the readout system.

The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne telescope designed to study astrophysical sources of nuclear line emission and polarization at soft gamma-ray (0.2-10 MeV) energies. NCT uses high-purity germanium strip detectors for 3D tracking of photon interactions. Compton imaging enables effective background rejection, resulting in a compact but highly efficient instrument. The NCT prototype completed a successful flight from Fort Sumner, New Mexico in 2005. We have since integrated additional detectors, updated the readout electronics, and improved other flight systems. Two flights of the full instrument are upcoming: a conventional flight in New Mexico and a long duration flight from Australia. We give an overview of the instrument and its status prior to the planned balloon flights.

Observations of the gamma-ray sky reveal the most powerful sources and the most violent events in the Universe. While at lower wavebands the observed emission is generally dominated by thermal processes, the gamma-ray sky provides us with a view on the non-thermal Universe. Here particles are accelerated to extreme relativistic energies by mechanisms which are still poorly understood, and nuclear reactions are synthesizing the basic constituents of our world. Cosmic accelerators and cosmic explosions are major science themes that are addressed in the gamma-ray regime. While Fermi will take the next step in surveying the high-energy (~GeV) sky, and NuSTAR will pioneer focusing observations at hard X-ray energies (to ~80 keV), there is currently no successor mission planned to ESA's INTEGRAL observatory which currently provides important new insights into the MeV sky, albeit at much more modest sensitivities. There will be clearly a growing need to perform deeper, more focused investigations of gamma-ray sources in the 100-keV to MeV regime. Recent technological advances in the domain of gamma-ray focusing using Laue diffraction and multilayer-coated mirror techniques have paved the way towards a gamma-ray mission, providing major improvements compared to past missions regarding sensitivity and angular resolution. Such a future Gamma-Ray Imager will allow the study of particle acceleration processes and explosion physics in unprecedented detail, providing essential clues on the innermost nature of the most violent and most energetic processes in the Universe.

GRIPS is an envisioned space telescope for Gamma-Ray burst Investigation via Polarimetry and Spectroscopy. It will be capable of imaging gamma rays in the energy range from roughly 200 keV up to at least 50 MeV via Compton scattering and pair creation. GRIPS will also provide unprecedented sensitivities for nuclear-line science. With a field-of-view of roughly 50° HWHM, energy resolutions of ∼5% FWHM at 511 keV and ∼2% at 1809 keV, angular resolutions of 3.3° at 511 keV and 1.4° at 1809 keV, and effective areas after background cuts of ∼450 cm 2 at 511 keV and ∼200 cm 2 at 1809 keV, GRIPS will achieve all-sky narrow-line point-source sensitivities of 9 × 10 −6 ph/cm 2 /s for 511 keV and 4 × 10 −7 ph/cm 2 /s at 1809 keV after five years mission time.

Considerable interest has been manifested for the use of high-brilliance X-ray synchrotron sources and X-ray Free-Electron Lasers for the investigation of samples.

Focusing of γ-rays in the nuclear-line energy regime is a feasible and promising approach for high-sensitivity γ-ray (line) studies of individual sources. This approach combines two unique advantages over “traditional” instrumentation for γ-ray astronomy: arcminute resolutions and a decoupling of collection and detection areas, with the corresponding potential for increased sensitivity. Laue Lenses use diffraction on lattice planes in the volume of a crystal to concentrate photons. Suitable crystals for MeV lenses exist, and lenses with >100 keV bandpasses and ∼arcmin fields-of-view are feasible today. Fresnel phase shift lenses present another, longer-term possibility for γ-ray focusing. The current status of instrumentation development, lens missions under consideration, and some of the nuclear astrophysics observations such instruments could enable are described.

The Advanced Compton Telescope (ACT) has been selected by NASA for a one-year “vision mission” study. The study’s main goal is to determine feasible instrument configurations to achieve ACT’s sensitivity requirements, and to give recommendations for technology development. Space-based instruments operating in the energy range of nuclear lines are subject to complex backgrounds generated by cosmic rays, earth albedo radiations, trapped particles, and diffuse gamma rays; typically measurements are significantly background-dominated. Therefore accurate, detailed simulations of the background induced in different ACT configurations, and exploration of event selection and reconstruction techniques for reducing these backgrounds, are crucial to determining the capabilities of a given instrument configuration. The ACT simulation team has assembled a complete suite of tools that allows the generation of particle backgrounds for a given orbit, their propagation through any instrument and spacecraft geometry – including delayed photon emission from instrument activation – as well as the selection and reconstruction of Compton events in the given detectors. We describe here the scope of the ACT simulation effort and the suite of tools used.

With focusing of gamma rays in the nuclear-line energy regime starting to establish itself as a feasible and very promising approach for high-sensitivity γ-ray (line) studies of individual sources, optimizing the focal plane instrumentation for γ-ray lens telescopes is a prime concern. Germanium detectors offer the best energy resolution available at ∼2 keV FWHM at 1MeV and thus constitute the detector of choice for a spectroscopy mission in the MeV energy range. Using a Compton detector focal plane has three advantages over monolithic detectors: additional knowledge about (Compton) events enhances background rejection capabilities, the inherently finely pixellated detector naturally allows the selection of events according to the focal spot size and position, and Compton detectors are inherently sensitive to γ-ray polarization. We use the extensive simulation and analysis package assembled for the ACT vision mission study to explore achievable sensitivities for different Ge Compton focal plane configurations as a first step towards determining an optimum configuration.

Since the discovery of the cosmological origin of GRBs there has been growing interest in using these transient events to probe the quantum gravity energy scale in the range 10^16--10^19 GeV, up to the Planck mass scale. This energy scale can manifest itself through a measurable modification in the electromagnetic radiation dispersion relation for high energy photons originating from cosmological distances. We have used data from the gamma-ray burst (GRB) of 6 December 2002 (GRB021206) to place an upper bound on the energy dispersion of the speed of light. The limit on the first-order quantum gravity effects derived from this single GRB indicate that the energy scale is in excess of 1.8x10^17 GeV. We discuss a program to further constrain the energy scale by systematically studying such GRBs., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJL

We report on a prototype detector system designed to perform imaging and spectroscopy on 20–250 MeV neutrons. The detection techniques employed can be applied to measurements in a variety of disciplines including solar and atmospheric physics, radiation therapy and nuclear materials monitoring. The detector measures the energy and direction of neutrons by detecting double neutron–proton scatters and recording images of the ionization tracks of the recoil protons in a densely packed bundle of scintillating plastic fibers stacked in orthogonal layers. The scintillation tracks are detected and imaged by photomultipliers and image intensifier/CCD camera optics. By tracking the recoil protons from individual neutrons, the kinematics of the scatter are determined. This directional information results in a high signal-to-noise measurement. The self-triggering and track imaging features of a prototype for tracking in two dimensions are demonstrated in calibrations with 14–65 MeV neutrons, 20–67.5 MeV protons, and with cosmic-ray muons. Preliminary results of phantom imaging measurements using a proton beam are also presented. We discuss several applications for this detector technique and outline future development work.

The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne Compton telescope designed for the study of astrophysical sources in the soft gamma-ray regime (200 keV--20 MeV). NCT's ten high-purity germanium crossed-strip detectors measure the deposited energies and three-dimensional positions of gamma-ray interactions in the sensitive volume, and this information is used to restrict the initial photon to a circle on the sky using the Compton scatter technique. Thus NCT is able to perform spectroscopy, imaging, and polarization analysis on soft gamma-ray sources. NCT is one of the next generation of Compton telescopes --- so-called compact Compton telescopes (CCTs) --- which can achieve effective areas comparable to COMPTEL's with an instrument that is a fraction of the size. The Crab Nebula was the primary target for the second flight of the NCT instrument, which occurred on 17--18 May 2009 in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Analysis of 29.3 ks of data from the flight reveals an image of the Crab at a significance of 4-sigma. This is the first reported detection of an astrophysical source by a CCT., Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

The High Efficiency Multi-mode Imager (HEMI) is a combined Compton and coded mask imager designed to detect and image gamma rays from ~30 keV up to a few MeV. It consists of 1-cm3-size coplanar-grid CdZnTe detectors with an energy resolution of ~2 % FWHM at 662 keV. We present the simulation and data analysis pipeline for HEMI as well as first results from measurements with an eight-detector test setup in Compton mode (spectra, angular resolution, and reconstructed images) and comparisons with simulations.

Cosima is the Geant4-based simulator of the medium-energy gamma-ray astronomy library MEGAlib. Within the MEGAlib framework, Cosima is designed to be a simple, fool-proof interface to Geant4 and to enable the simulation of most of the measurement scenarios encountered by X-ray and gamma-ray detectors in space and on Earth.

The Gamma-Ray Imager (GRI) is a novel mission concept that will provide an unprecedented sensitivity leap in the soft gamma-ray domain by using for the first time a focusing lens built of Laue diffracting crystals. The lens will cover an energy band from 200 - 1300 keV with an effective area reaching 600 cm2. It will be complemented by a single reflection multilayer coated mirror, extending the GRI energy band into the hard X-ray regime, down to ~10 keV. The concentrated photons will be collected by a position sensitive pixelised CZT stack detector. We estimate continuum sensitivities of better than 10^-7 ph/cm2/s/keV for a 100 ks exposure; the narrow line sensitivity will be better than 3 x 10^-6 ph/cm2/s for the same integration time. As focusing instrument, GRI will have an angular resolution of better than 30 arcsec within a field of view of roughly 5 arcmin - an unprecedented achievement in the gamma-ray domain. Owing to the large focal length of 100 m of the lens and the mirror, the optics and detector will be placed on two separate spacecrafts flying in formation in a high elliptical orbit. R&D work to enable the lens focusing technology and to develop the required focal plane detector is currently underway, financed by ASI, CNES, ESA, and the Spanish Ministery of Education and Science. The GRI mission is proposed as class M mission for ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program. GRI will allow studies of particle acceleration processes and explosion physics in unprecedented detail, providing essential clues on the innermost nature of the most violent and most energetic processes in the Universe., 11 pages, to be pubslihed in the SPIE proceedings

Hard X-ray and low-to-medium-energy gamma-ray telescopes may be exposed to many different types of background radiation ranging from cosmic rays to secondary particles from Earth’s atmosphere and charged particles trapped in radiation belts. Due to low source count rates in this energy regime, the background will dominate the source signal in many cases, in some up to a factor of 100. Therefore reliable Monte Carlo simulations of the background are extremely important to understand the recorded data and to predict the performance of future telescopes. We report on the status of the development and verification of a Geant4-based tool to simulate those background components, especially the resulting detector activation due to hadron interactions, as a successor to MGGPOD. Initial comparisons between simulations and background measurements of the TGRS detector are promising: Geant4 can reproduce the shape of the background to an accuracy better than 20%. In addition, many of the nuclear activation lines seen in the measurements are also present in the simulations — although there is still room for improvement especially with respect to the agreement of the line intensities.

The Medium-Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy library MEGAlib is an open-source object-oriented software library designed to simulate and analyze data of low-to-medium-energy gamma-ray telescopes, especially Compton telescopes. The library comprises all necessary simulation and data analysis tools including geometry construction, Monte-Carlo simulation, response creation, event reconstruction, image reconstruction, and other high-level data-analysis tools.

The nuclear Compton telescope (NCT) is a balloon- borne soft gamma-ray (0.2 MeV-10 MeV) telescope designed to study astrophysical sources of nuclear line emission and polarization. A prototype instrument was successfully launched from Fort Sumner, New Mexico on June 1, 2005. The NCT prototype consisted of two 3D position sensitive high-purity germanium strip detectors (GeDs) fabricated with amorphous Ge contacts. We are currently working toward two balloon flights: another conventional balloon flight from Fort Sumner, New Mexico in September 2008, and a long-duration balloon flight (LDBF) from Alice Springs, Australia in December 2009. The NCT instrument is being upgraded to include all twelve planned GeDs. The electronics for all twelve detectors have been redesigned for smaller size, lower power consumption, and lower noise, and are now being fabricated and tested. Here we present our current progress in preparing for the flights.

The Advanced Compton Telescope (ACT), the next major step in gamma-ray astronomy, will probe the fires where chemical elements are formed by enabling high-resolution spectroscopy of nuclear emission from supernova explosions. During the past two years, our collaboration has been undertaking a NASA mission concept study for ACT. This study was designed to (1) transform the key scientific objectives into specific instrument requirements, (2) to identify the most promising technologies to meet those requirements, and (3) to design a viable mission concept for this instrument. We present the results of this study, including scientific goals and expected performance, mission design, and technology recommendations.

The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne soft gamma-ray (0.2MeV-10MeV) telescope designed to study astrophysical sources of nuclear line emission and polarization. A prototype instrument was successfully launched from Ft. Sumner, NM on June 1, 2005. The NCT prototype consists of two 3D position sensitive High-Purity-Germanium (HPGe) strip detectors fabricated with amorphous Ge contacts. The novel ultra-compact design and new technologies allow NCT to achieve high efficiencies with excellent spectral resolution and background reduction. Energy and positioning calibration data was acquired pre-flight in Fort Sumner, NM after the full instrument integration. Here we discuss our calibration techniques and results, and detector efficiencies. Comparisons with simulations are presented as well.

International audience; With focusing of gamma rays in the nuclear-line energy regime establishing itself as a feasible and very promising approach for high-sensitivity gamma-ray studies of individual sources, optimizing the focal plane instrumentation for gamma-lens telescopes is a prime objective. The detector of choice for a focusing nuclear-line spectroscopy mission would be the one with the best energy resolution available over the energy range of interest: Germanium. Using a Compton detector focal plane has three advantages over monolithic detectors: additional knowledge about (Compton) events enhances background rejection capabilities, the inherently finely pixellated detector naturally allows the selection of events according to the focal spot size and position and could enable source imaging, and Compton detectors are inherently sensitive to gamma-ray polarization. Suitable Ge-strip detectors that could be assembled into a sensitive high-resolution focal plane for a gamma-ray lens are available today. They have been extensively tested in the laboratory and flown on the Nuclear Compton Telescope balloon from Ft. Sumner in 2005. In the course of the ACT vision mission study, an extensive simulation and analysis package for Compton telescopes has been assembled. We leverage off this work to explore achievable sensitivities for different Ge Compton focal plane configurations - and compare them to sensitivities achievable with less complex detectors - as a step towards determining an optimum configuration.

MAX is a proposed Laue lens gamma-ray telescope taking advantage of Bragg diffraction in crystals to concentrate incident photons onto a distant detector. The Laue lens and the detector are carried by two separate satellites flying in formation. Significant effort is being devoted to studying different types of crystals that may be suitable for focusing gamma rays in two 100 keV wide energy bands centered on two lines which constitute the prime astrophysical interest of the MAX mission: the 511 keV positron annihilation line, and the broadened 847 keV line from the decay of 56Co copiously produced in Type Ia supernovae. However, to optimize the performance of MAX, it is also necessary to optimize the detector used to collect the source photons concentrated by the lens. We address this need by applying proven Monte Carlo and event reconstruction packages to predict the performance of MAX for three different Ge detector concepts: a standard coaxial detector, a stack of segmented detectors, and a Compton camera consisting of a stack of strip detectors. Each of these exhibits distinct advantages and disadvantages regarding fundamental instrumental characteristics such as detection efficiency or background rejection, which ultimately determine achievable sensitivities. We conclude that the Compton camera is the most promising detector for MAX in particular, and for Laue lens gamma-ray telecopes in general., Comment: accepted for publication in special issue of Experimental Astronomy for Proceedings of Gamma-Wave 2005 held at Bonifacio, France; A&A style file

The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne soft gamma ray (0.2-10 MeV) telescope designed to study astrophysical sources of nuclear line emission and gamma ray polarization. A prototype instrument was successfully launched from Ft. Sumner, NM on June 1, 2005. The NCT prototype consists of two 3D position sensitive High-Purity-Germanium (HPGe) strip detectors fabricated with amorphous Ge contacts. The novel ultra-compact design and new technologies allow NCT to achieve high efficiencies with excellent spectral resolution and background reduction. We have completed our preliminary calibrations of both the energy and the 3D position of interactions for the prototype instrument. Determination of both the energy and the position is crucial for Compton imaging, and minimizing the errors in each improves the angular resolution. Because of the compact design of the detectors and the high spectral resolution of germanium, we expect the position uncertainties to dominate over energy uncertainties when determining the angular resolution. Detailed depth calibrations and a preliminary determination of angular resolution as a function of energy are described. We determine how measurement uncertainties and physical limitations (energy uncertainty, position uncertainty, Doppler broadening, and systematics) constrain the ultimate angular resolution.

The SPI instrument has been launched on-board the INTEGRAL observatory on October 17, 2002. SPI is a spectrometer devoted to the sky observation in the 20 keV-8 MeV energy range using 19 germanium detectors. The performance of the cryogenic system is nominal and allows to cool the 19 kg of germanium down to 85 K with a comfortable margin. The energy resolution of the whole camera is 2.5 keV at 1.1 MeV. This resolution degrades with time due to particle irradiation in space. We show that the annealing process allows the recovery of the initial performance. The anticoincidence shield works as expected, with a low threshold at 75 keV, reducing the GeD background by a factor of 20. The digital front-end electronics system allows the perfect alignement in time of all the signals as well as the optimisation of the dead time (12%). We demonstrate that SPI is able to map regions as complex as the galactic plane. The obtained spectrum of the Crab nebula validates the present version of our response matrix. The 3 $\sigma$ sensitivity of the instrument at 1 MeV is 8 10$^{-7}$ph$\cdot$cm$^{-2}\cdot$s$^{-1}\cdot$keV$^{-1}$ for the continuum and 3 10$^{-5}$ph$\cdot$cm$^{-2}\cdot$s$^{-1}$ for narrow lines., Comment: 10 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in A&A (special INTEGRAL volume)

Three calibration campaigns of the spectrometer SPI have been performed before launch in order to determine the instrument characteristics, such as the effective detection area, the spectral resolution and the angular resolution. Absolute determination of the effective area has been obtained from simulations and measurements. At 1 MeV, the effective area is 65 cm^2 for a point source on the optical axis, the spectral resolution ~2.3 keV. The angular resolution is better than 2.5 deg and the source separation capability about 1 deg. Some temperature dependant parameters will require permanent in-flight calibration., Comment: 9 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in A&AL (INTEGRAL Special issue)

We present the analysis of the first observations of the Cygnus region by the SPI spectrometer onboard the Integral Gamma Ray Observatory, encompassing ${\sim}$ 600 ks of data. Three sources namely Cyg X-1, Cyg X-3 and EXO 2030+375 were clearly detected. Our data illustrate the temporal variability of Cyg X-1 in the energy range from 20 keV to 300 keV. The spectral analysis shows a remarkable stability of the Cyg X-1 spectra when averaged over one day timescale. The other goal of these observations is SPI inflight calibration and performance verification. The latest objective has been achieved as demonstrated by the results presented in this paper., Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in A&A (special INTEGRAL volume)

We report the scientific motivation for and performance measurements of a prototype detector system for SONTRAC, a solar neutron tracking experiment designed to study high- energy solar flare processes. The full SONTRAC instrument will measure the energy and direction of 20 to 200 MeV neutrons by imaging the ionization tracks of the recoil protons in a densely packed bundle of scintillating plastic fibers. The prototype detector consists of a 12.7 mm square bundle of 250 micrometer scintillating plastic fibers, 10 cm long. A photomultiplier detects scintillation light from one end of the fiber bundle and provides a detection trigger to an image intensifier/CCD camera system at the opposite end. The image of the scintillation light is recorded. By tracking the recoil protons from individual neutrons the kinematics of the scattering are determined, providing a high signal to noise measurement. The predicted energy resolution is 10% at 20 MeV, improving with energy. This energy resolution translates into an uncertainty in the production time of the neutron at the Sun of 30 s for a 20 MeV neutron, also improving with energy. A SONTRAC instrument will also be capable of detecting and measuring high-energy gamma rays greater than 20 MeV as a 'solid-state spark chamber.' The self-triggering and track imaging features of the prototype are demonstrated with cosmic ray muons and 14 MeV neutrons. Design considerations for a space flight instrument are presented.