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Friday, January 08, 2021

Gigapixel X-Ray Camera

Arxiv.org paper "Billion-pixel X-ray camera (BiPC-X)" by Zhehui Wang, Kaitlin Anagnost, Cris W. Barnes, D. M. Dattelbaum, Eric R. Fossum, Eldred Lee, Jifeng Liu, J. J. Ma, W. Z. Meijer, Wanyi Nie, C. M. Sweeney, Audrey C. Therrien, Hsinhan Tsai, and Xin Que from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dartmouth College, Gigajot, and Universit´e de Sherbrooke presents a 21MP tiled prototype. The paper is also published by AIP Review of Scientific Instruments.

"The continuing improvement in quantum efficiency (above 90% for single visible photons), reduction in noise (below 1 electron per pixel), and shrink in pixel pitch (less than 1 micron) motivate billion-pixel X-ray cameras (BiPC-X) based on commercial CMOS imaging sensors. We describe BiPC-X designs and prototype construction based on flexible tiling of commercial CMOS imaging sensors with millions of pixels. Device models are given for direct detection of low energy X-rays (< 10 keV) and indirect detection of higher energies using scintillators. Modified Birks's law is proposed for light-yield nonproportionality in scintillators as a function of X-ray energy. Single X-ray sensitivity and spatial resolution have been validated experimentally using laboratory X-ray source and the Argonne Advanced Photon Source. Possible applications include wide field-of-view (FOV) or large X-ray aperture measurements in high-temperature plasmas, the state-of-the-art synchrotron, X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL), and pulsed power facilities."

1 comment:

  1. I found myself, with a few others, appearing as co-author on this paper a bit by surprise. The lead LANL author did prepare this as a conference paper and gave us a day or so to respond with edits. But he did not mention it went to arXiv until after it was submitted. I have previously expressed my opinion in this blog about arXiv regarding publishing papers that did not go thru peer review.
    The short version is mostly that they could be greatly improved (or rejected sometimes) after peer review. There is nothing wrong with this paper as far as I know, but still weird to have it suddenly and publicly published, and seeing it on this blog first, before reading the LANL email!
    While we are working with LANL on a long term lightly-funded collaboration, and we are grateful for their support, this work does not include much of that work from Dartmouth or Gigajot, and nearly all of what is reported was work performed by LANL.

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