Low-Energy X-ray Performance of SOI Pixel Sensors for Astronomy, "XRPIX"

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the low-energy X-ray detection capabilities of XRPIX6E, a silicon-on-insulator pixel sensor with a Pinned Depleted Diode structure, highlighting improvements in noise reduction and detection thresholds for future X-ray astronomy missions.

Contribution

It reports on the low-energy X-ray performance of XRPIX6E with a PDD structure, demonstrating reduced noise and detection of X-rays down to 1.1 keV in certain regions.

Findings

Successful detection of 1.5 keV Al-K X-rays in frame readout mode.

Inability to detect 0.68 keV F-K X-rays in event-driven mode.

Region-to-region variation affects detection thresholds.

Abstract

We have been developing a new type of X-ray pixel sensors, "XRPIX", allowing us to perform imaging spectroscopy in the wide energy band of 1-20 keV for the future Japanese X-ray satellite "FORCE". The XRPIX devices are fabricated with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor silicon-on-insulator technology, and have the "Event-Driven readout mode", in which only a hit event is read out by using hit information from a trigger output function equipped with each pixel. This paper reports on the low-energy X-ray performance of the "XRPIX6E" device with a Pinned Depleted Diode (PDD) structure. The PDD structure especially reduces the readout noise, and hence is expected to largely improve the quantum efficiencies for low-energy X-rays. While F-K X-rays at 0.68 keV and Al-K X-rays at 1.5 keV are successfully detected in the "Frame readout mode", in which all pixels are read out serially without using the trigger output function, the device is able to detect Al-K X-rays, but not F-K X-rays in the Event-Driven readout mode. Non-uniformity is observed in the counts maps of Al-K X-rays in the Event-Driven readout mode, which is due to region-to-region variation of the pedestal voltages at the input to the comparator circuit. The lowest available threshold energy is 1.1 keV for a small region in the device where the non-uniformity is minimized. The noise of the charge sensitive amplifier at the sense node and the noise related to the trigger output function are ~$18~e^-$ (rms) and ~$13~e^-$ (rms), respectively.