Reprint of “Radiation damage impact on hybrid-pixel detectors data”

Abstract

This work aimed to quantify the influence of the deposited dose at the hybrid detector ASIC on the resulting image quality. Low (932±4 Gy) and high (6310±24 Gy) dose experiments were performed by irradiating a Medipix3RX single chip detector with the polychromatic beam from the Brazilian Synchrotron X-ray Imaging beamline. It was possible to evaluate subtle effects by using a noise component model based on estimating the quantum, electronic and structural noise contributions. Visible effects were quantified by analyzing the evolution of the histogram of the pixel counts at the irradiated area. The dose threshold for subtle damages was 388±3 Gy deposited in the gate oxide and shallow trench isolation oxide layers, while visible damages were observed for doses higher than 2635±15 Gy. A recovery of the damaged pixels with time was noticed and quantified, reaching the half-life time at 1.84±0.02 h after irradiation. These results encourage periodical maintenance procedures, for example through a new equalization matrix generation, which proved to be a possible tool for recovering the detector performance.