Heat Sinking, Crosstalk, and Temperature Uniformity for Large Close-Packed Microcalorimeter Arrays

In a large close-packed array of x-ray microcalorimeters, sufficient heat sinking is important to minimize thermal crosstalk between pixels and to make the bath temperature of all the pixels uniform. We have measured crosstalk in our 8 x 8 pixel arrays. The shapes of the thermal crosstalk pulses are reproduced well as a convolution of heat input from the source pixel and the thermal decay in the receiver pixel. The amount of the thermal crosstalk is clearly dependent on the degree of electrothermal feedback. We have compared the magnitude of thermal crosstalk with and without a heat-sinking copper layer on the backside of the silicon frame as a function of distance between the source and receiver pixels. Using the results obtained, we have estimated the degradation of energy resolution that is expected as a function of count rate. We have also studied the temperature distribution within an array due to continuous heating from the TES bias to estimate impacts on the uniformity of the pixel performance.