Absolute Energy Calibration of X-ray TESs with 0.04 eV Uncertainty at 6.4 keV in a Hadron-Beam Environment

Abstract

A performance evaluation of superconducting transition-edge sensors (TESs) in the environment of a pion beam line at a particle accelerator is presented. Averaged across the 209 functioning sensors in the array, the achieved energy resolution is 5.2 eV FWHM at Co $K_{\alpha }$ (6.9 keV) when the pion beam is off and 7.3 eV at a beam rate of 1.45 MHz. Absolute energy uncertainty of $\pm$0.04 eV is demonstrated for Fe $K_{\alpha }$ (6.4 keV) with in-situ energy calibration obtained from other nearby known x-ray lines. To achieve this small uncertainty, it is essential to consider the non-Gaussian energy response of the TESs and thermal cross-talk pile-up effects due to charged-particle hits in the silicon substrate of the TES array.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in J. Low Temperature Physics, special issue for the proceedings of the Low Temperature Detectors 16 conference

References in corpus (2)

• Precision measurement of the $3d\to 2p$ x-ray energy in kaonic ${}^4$He
• Study of the dependency on magnetic field and bias voltage of an AC-biased TES microcalorimeter

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Eliminating the non-Gaussian spectral response of X-ray absorbers for transition-edge sensors
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• Testing Quantum Electrodynamics with Exotic Atoms
• Hadron Physics at J-PARC
• Broad-band High-Energy Resolution Hard X-ray Spectroscopy using Transition Edge Sensors at SPring-8
• On low-energy tail distortions in the detector responsefunction of x-ray microcalorimeter spectrometers
• Microstructure analysis of bismuth absorbers for transition-edge sensor X-ray microcalorimeters
• Mitigating the effects of charged particle strikes on TES arrays for exotic atom X-ray experiments