Multi-energy calibration of a PILATUS3 CdTe detector for hard x-ray measurements of magnetically confined fusion plasmas

Abstract

A multi-energy hard x-ray pin-hole camera based on the PILATUS3 X 100K-M CdTe detector has been developed at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory for installation on the Tungsten Environment in Steady State Tokamak. This camera will be employed to study thermal plasma features such as electron temperature as well as non-thermal effects such as fast electron tails produced by a lower hybrid radiofrequency current drive and the birth of runaway electrons. The innovative aspect of the system lies in the possibility of setting the threshold energy independently for each of the ∼100k pixels of the detector. This feature allows for the measurement of the x-ray emission in multiple energy ranges with adequate space and time resolution (∼1 cm, 2 ms) and coarse energy resolution. In this work, the energy dependence of each pixel was calibrated within the range 15 keV–100 keV using a tungsten x-ray tube and emission from a variety of fluorescence targets (from yttrium to uranium). The data corresponding to pairs of Kα emission lines are fit to the characteristic responsivity (“S-curve”), which describes the detector sensitivity across the 64 possible energy threshold values for each pixel; this novel capability is explored by fine-tuning the voltage of a six-bit digital-analog converter after the charge-sensitive amplifier for each of the ∼100k pixels. This work presents the results of the calibration including a statistical analysis. It was found that the achievable energy resolution is mainly limited by the width of the S-curve to 3 keV–10 keV for threshold energies up to 50 keV, and to ≥20 keV for energies above 60 keV.

Determination of the mean energy of fast electron losses and anisotropies through thick-target emission on WEST

“…The detector has been calibrated in energy at pixel-level in the range 8-100 keV, following a procedure originally implemented by some of the authors and already successfully applied to similar soft x-ray silicon detectors installed in other fusion experiments [11][12][13]. The procedure consists in scanning the detector response by varying the voltage of an in-pixel six-bit digital-analog converter while the detector is irradiated by fluorescence from a series of x-ray sources [14]. It is the first time this procedure was applied to a CdTe detector.…”