An interface to evaluate the performance of photon-counting detectors

Abstract

Photon-counting devices are widely used as detectors for laboratory and astronomical research. Often, they come with software just to manage the basic read-out electronics (read-out speed, read-time, subframing…) and to produce movies of the captured events. These movies require further processing to generate the final images for scientific use. In this contribution, we describe the tool we have developed, and its functionalities, devoted to this end. The interface has been created in the frame of the characterization campaign of the MicroChannel Plate detector on board the Spektr-UF (WSO-UV) Space Telescope.This interface is provided with different features that enable the evaluation of the spatial and time-depending stability of the detectors to be analyzed, such as the splitting of the videos into the different frames that compose the measurement or the numerical addition of a series of frames to generate a time-integrated image. In addition, it is capable of extracting and classifying each of the local luminous events that reach the MCP in every single frame (or in a set of frames) by adjusting different parameters of the DAOFIND algorithm such as the threshold, the full-width half-maximum or the sigma radius. The interface creates a list of all identified events, specifying their position, size or intensity. From this data, a 3Drepresentation of the spatial distribution of the classified events can be generated as heat maps, as well as a representation of the number of events detected within a confined area of the detector to evaluate the stability of the response at any moment.This tool has been developed in Python and will be released as open software to the scientific community.