Gaining efficiency and resolution in soft X-ray emission spectrometers thanks to directly illuminated CCD detectors

The back-illuminated charge coupled devices (CCD) are suitable for soft X-ray photon detection. Their nominal performances suggest that they can boost both efficiency and resolving power of X-ray spectrometers based on diffraction gratings and two-dimensional position sensitive detectors. We tested the performances of two commercially available CCDs, intended to replace a more traditional microchannel plate (MCP) detector. Our tests show that the devices have excellent performances in terms of dark current, response linearity, detection efficiency and spatial resolution. We observed that the CCDs have better efficiency (more than 10 times) and better resolution (∼3 times) than the MCP. Moreover we found an intrinsic limit for the spatial resolution, which is almost independent of the detector pixel size and is estimated around 25 μm.