A laboratory grade hybrid pixel detector
The 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become outdated very soon when we look at the most recent developments of the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].