A Transition-edge Sensor-based X-ray Spectrometer for the Study of Highly Charged Ions at the National Institute of Standards and Technology Electron Beam Ion Trap

Abstract

We report on the design, commissioning, and initial measurements of a Transition-edge Sensor (TES) x-ray spectrometer for the Electron Beam Ion Trap (EBIT) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Over the past few decades, the NIST EBIT has produced numerous studies of highly charged ions in diverse fields such as atomic physics, plasma spectroscopy, and laboratory astrophysics. The newly commissioned NIST EBIT TES Spectrometer (NETS) improves the measurement capabilities of the EBIT through a combination of high x-ray collection efficiency and resolving power. NETS utilizes 192 individual TES x-ray microcalorimeters (166/192 yield) to improve upon the collection area by a factor of ~30 over the 4-pixel neutron transmutation doped germanium-based microcalorimeter spectrometer previously used at the NIST EBIT. The NETS microcalorimeters are optimized for the x-ray energies from roughly 500 eV to 8,000 eV and achieve an energy resolution of 3.7 eV to 5.0 eV over this range, a more modest (<2X) improvement over the previous microcalorimeters. Beyond this energy range NETS can operate with various trade-offs, the most significant of which are reduced efficiency at lower energies and being limited to a subset of the pixels at higher energies. As an initial demonstration of the capabilities of NETS, we measured transitions in He-like and H-like O, Ne, and Ar as well as Ni-like W. We detail the energy calibration and data analysis techniques used to transform detector counts into x-ray spectra, a process that will be the basis for analyzing future data.

References in corpus (12)

• Spectroscopy of diagnostically-important magnetic-dipole lines in highly-charged 3d${}^n$ ions of tungsten
• The Practice of Pulse Processing
• Fe XVII X-ray Line Ratios for Accurate Astrophysical Plasma Diagnostics
• Eliminating the non-Gaussian spectral response of X-ray absorbers for transition-edge sensors
• Microcalorimeter Spectroscopy at High Pulse Rates: a Multi-Pulse Fitting Technique
• A Reassessment of Absolute Energies of the X-ray L Lines of Lanthanide Metals
• E1 transitions between states with n = 1 to 6 in helium-like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, neon, silicon, and argon
• Absolute Energy Calibration of X-ray TESs with 0.04 eV Uncertainty at 6.4 keV in a Hadron-Beam Environment
• Time-division SQUID multiplexers with reduced sensitivity to external magnetic fields
• Current distribution and transition width in superconducting transition-edge sensors
• Measuring the Variation in Nuclear Charge Radius of Xe Isotopes by EUV Spectroscopy of Highly-Charged Na-like Ions
• Visible, EUV, and X-ray Spectroscopy at the NIST EBIT Facility

Cited by in corpus (7)

• X-ray spectra of the Fe-L complex II: atomic data constraints from EBIT experiment and X-ray grating observations of Capella
• Broad-band High-Energy Resolution Hard X-ray Spectroscopy using Transition Edge Sensors at SPring-8
• Absolute energies and emission line shapes of the L x-ray transitions of lanthanide metals
• Transition-Edge Sensors for cryogenic X-ray imaging spectrometers
• Dielectronic resonances of LMn and LNn (n $\ge$ 4) series in highly-charged M-shell tungsten ions
• The potential of microcalorimeter x-ray spectrometers for measurement of relative fluorescence-line intensities
• Strong Negative Electrothermal Feedback in Thermal Kinetic Inductance Detectors