The Si/CdTe semiconductor Compton camera of the ASTRO-H Soft Gamma-ray Detector (SGD)

Abstract

The Soft Gamma-ray Detector (SGD) is one of the instrument payloads onboard ASTRO-H, and will cover a wide energy band (60–600keV) at a background level 10 times better than instruments currently in orbit. The SGD achieves low background by combining a Compton camera scheme with a narrow field-of-view active shield. The Compton camera in the SGD is realized as a hybrid semiconductor detector system which consists of silicon and cadmium telluride (CdTe) sensors. The design of the SGD Compton camera has been finalized and the final prototype, which has the same configuration as the flight model, has been fabricated for performance evaluation. The Compton camera has overall dimensions of 12cm×12cm×12cm, consisting of 32 layers of Si pixel sensors and 8 layers of CdTe pixel sensors surrounded by 2 layers of CdTe pixel sensors. The detection efficiency of the Compton camera reaches about 15% and 3% for 100keV and 511keV gamma rays, respectively. The pixel pitch of the Si and CdTe sensors is 3.2mm, and the signals from all 13,312 pixels are processed by 208 ASICs developed for the SGD. Good energy resolution is afforded by semiconductor sensors and low noise ASICs, and the obtained energy resolutions with the prototype Si and CdTe pixel sensors are 1.0–2.0keV (FWHM) at 60keV and 1.6–2.5keV (FWHM) at 122keV, respectively. This results in good background rejection capability due to better constraints on Compton kinematics. Compton camera energy resolutions achieved with the final prototype are 6.3keV (FWHM) at 356keV and 10.5keV (FWHM) at 662keV, which satisfy the instrument requirements for the SGD Compton camera (better than 2%). Moreover, a low intrinsic background has been confirmed by the background measurement with the final prototype.