The intense beams of X-rays afforded by synchrotron sources such as the Diamond Lightsource, put severe demands on the associated detector technologies used to instrument the beamlines at these sources, requiring detectors which are capable of very high counting rates. For X-ray crystallographic studies involving scattering and/or diffraction in the wide angular range (5-65o), further requirements of good spatial (i.e. angular) resolution and parallax free detection compound the issue further. A detector to match these criteria was deesigned and built, based on the microstrip gas counter technology, which we call the HOTWAXS detector (High Overall Throughput Wide Angle X-ray Scattering detector)
To perform fast, combined, 1-D WAXS well requires an excellently matched set of detectors. Until recently no such options were available. Microstrip gas counter technology has made this feasible and can offer high count rate capabilities >0.5GHz global, excellent dynamic range and very fast time framing <10µs. This is again far in excess of anything possible with the latest CCD technology
| Specification | |
|---|---|
| Angular range | 60 degrees (from 5 deg to 65 deg with direct beam at 0 deg) |
| Angular resolution | less than or equal to 0.16 deg (FWHM) |
| Local count rate (each instrumented channel) | 1M counts per second |
| Global count rate | 500M counts per second |
| Uniformity | X-ray response over the detector aperture of <5% RMS |
| Channels of preamplifier, discriminator and scalar | 512 individually instrumented |