Characterisation of individual pixel efficiency in the PILATUS II sensor

Synchrotron applications such as protein crystallography and small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) demand precise knowledge of detector pixel efficiency for data corrections. Current techniques used to determine detector efficiency are only applicable for the specific set-up for which the calibration is performed. Here the effect of comparator thresholding on pixel efficiency for PILATUS is presented for standard amplifier and shaper gain settings, allowing users to make necessary corrections to their intensity data for various threshold settings without requiring repeated empirical calibrations. A three-dimensional TCAD simulation of the sensor is also presented and is used to confirm the experimental result.