News and notices

A laboratory grade hybrid pixel detector

bm0070thumbnailThe United Nations proclaimed 2014 the International Year of Crystallography. Due to many of the activities and events taking place throughout the year, it is obvious, more so than in previous years, how crystallography strengthens and enriches all natural sciences. Take for example the breathtaking developments at modern large scale facilities, like third generation synchrotrons, X-ray free-electron lasers and neutron spallation sources, and the various remarkable improvements recently made to home facilities. The sealed X-ray tube has been almost totally replaced today by reliable microfocus or rotating anode sources, stronger by many orders of magnitude when compared to W. C. Röntgen's original device. The same is valid for detector technology, where the original film or scintillation detector, even the image plate, is nowadays almost totally substituted by charge-coupled devices (CCDs, CMOSs). Even they will become outdated very soon when we look at the most recent developments of the single-photon counting hybrid pixel area detector.

This new class of detector combines the virtues of speed of an area detector with the advantageous low noise and extremely high dynamic range of a point detector. The first pixel detectors have been designed and optimized for use with synchrotrons (e.g. PILATUS or EIGER from Dectris, or XPAD from imXPAD). Unfortunately, due partly to cost, data collection and software integration issues, these detectors have not yet reached the typical university laboratory. That is until now [Wenger et al. (2014). Acta Cryst. B70, 783-791; doi: 10.1107/S2052520614017338]. For the first time a group of authors present a pixel detector mounted on a commercial goniometer, equipped with a microfocus X-ray source, to generate high-resolution X-ray data.

The researchers have shown in the paper that high quality diffraction data suitable for accurate charge density studies can be collected by following their set-up.

The charge-density community will be eager to see further developments from this team such as a reduction in data acquisition time, addressing blind detector areas and improved data reduction to tackle estimated systematic errors and intensity variances.

This news story is a short excerpt taken from the commentary [Stalke (2014). Acta Cryst. B70, 781-782; doi: 10.1107/S2052520614021349].