A very large area (100 mm<sup>2</sup>) silicon drift detector for EXAFS applications

Abstract

A 100 mm2 silicon drift detector (SDD) has been developed in an effort to improve the solid angle of our Vortex® SDD. The 100 mm2 SDD features the same basic structure as our smaller area (50 mm2) devices and possesses the same advantages, including low noise, high count rates, and excellent energy resolution with thermoelectric cooling. The 100 mm2 SDD is ideal for low or high count rate applications in which the x-rays of interest are occurring over a large solid angle, such as are encountered in TXRF (total reflection x-ray ray fluorescence), EXAFS (extended x-ray absorption fine structure) and other synchrotron applications. The new 100 mm2 SDD has been evaluated in an EXAFS experiment at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which investigated the local atomic structure surrounding Mn in a LaMnO 3 /SrMnO 3 superlattice. Results show that the new large area SDD delivers excellent energy resolution, high peak-to-background and significantly reduces the data collection time for these types of sensitive EXAFS measurements.