Abstract
A visible-light digital camera is used for taking ordinary photos, but with new operational procedures it can measure the photon energy in the X-ray wavelength region and therefore see chemical elements. This report describes how one can observe X-rays by means of such an ordinary camera - The front cover of the camera is replaced by an opaque X-ray window to block visible light and to allow X-rays to pass; the camera takes many snap shots (called single-photon-counting mode) to record every photon event individually; an integrated-filtering method is newly proposed to correctly retrieve the energy of photons from raw camera images. Finally, the retrieved X-ray energy-dispersive spectra show fine energy resolution and great accuracy in energy calibration, and therefore the visible-light digital camera can be applied to routine X-ray fluorescence measurement to analyze the element composition in unknown samples. In addition, the visible-light digital camera is promising in that it could serve as a position sensitive X-ray energy detector. It may become able to measure the element map or chemical diffusion in a multi-element system if it is fabricated with external X-ray optic devices. Owing to the camera’s low expense and fine pixel size, the present method will be widely applied to the analysis of chemical elements as well as imaging.
Highlights
A visible-light digital camera is used for taking ordinary photos, but with new operational procedures it can measure the photon energy in the X-ray wavelength region and see chemical elements
This report describes how one can observe X-rays by means of such an ordinary camera - The front cover of the camera is replaced by an opaque X-ray window to block visible light and to allow X-rays to pass; the camera takes many snap shots to record every photon event individually; an integrated-filtering method is newly proposed to correctly retrieve the energy of photons from raw camera images
We propose an integrated-filtering method to ensure the retrieval process is effective and correct, high quality X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectra can be readily obtained after processing the raw camera images
Summary
Retrieving X-ray energy-dispersive spectra from camera images. Prior to the experiment, 100 dark images are acquired without any illumination of visible light or X-rays. One ROI is in the main peak at around 2200, which is expected to be the strong Kαpeak of vanadium in the sample; the other ROI is in the low energy background from 500 to 2000, which is thought to be made of incomplete-charge-collection photon events. This is because there are too many photon events in one image so that some of them may be overlapped and filtered out by the criteria of center-to-integrated ratio. When the single exposure time is set as 50 ms, the function of the count rates to the tube current is nearly linear, indicating that the capacity of count rates is abundant enough to measure the high-intensity X-rays in this experiment and there is no risk of saturation.
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