Characterization of spectrometric photon-counting X-ray detectors at different pitches

There is growing interest in energy-sensitive photon-counting detectors based on high flux X-ray imaging. Their potential applications include medical imaging, non-destructive testing and security. Innovative detectors of this type will need to count individual photons and sort them into selected energy bins, at several million counts per second and per mm(2). Cd(Zn) Te detector grade materials with a thickness of 1.5 to 3mm and pitches from 800 mu m down to 200 mu m were assembled onto interposer boards. These devices were tested using in-housedeveloped full-digital fast readout electronics. The 16-channel demonstrators, with 256 energy bins, were experimentally characterized by determining spectral resolution, count rate, and charge sharing, which becomes challenging at low pitch. Charge sharing correction was found to efficiently correct X-ray spectra up to 40 x 10(6) incident photons.s(-1).mm(-2).