Application of silicon drift detector in PIXE tomography system of Fudan University

Abstract

In the Nuclear Microprobe Laboratory of Fudan University, particle induced X-ray emission (PIXE) has invariably used the Si(Li) detector. Although it is a widely used X-ray detector, the Si(Li) detector has a low counting rate. In recent years, high-counting rate detectors such as the silicon drift detector (SDD) have developed rapidly. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of applying the SDD to PIXE tomography (PIXE-T) for the first time. We placed the Si(Li) detector and the SDD in symmetrical positions to collect X-rays emitted from a Cl-doped inertial confinement fusion (ICF) target simultaneously. The counting rate of the SDD is about 5 times that of the Si(Li) detector. The maximum likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) algorithm was used to reconstruct the projection slice by slice. The quality of the projections and the reconstructed images is improved using the SDD thanks to the higher number of events collected in the detector.