Speaker
Description
High-purity germanium (HPGe) remains the gold-standard sensor material for hard X-ray detection, offering superior energy resolution and detection efficiency. However, its widespread use is limited by the need for cryogenic cooling to suppress dark current. The NSLS-II Detector Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory has developed a series of monolithic, multi-element germanium detectors based on sensor arrays where pixel isolation is achieved through trenching, a process developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich, and read out using custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) designed at BNL. The devices include both strip and pixel array detectors, with element counts ranging from 64 to 382, deployed for various synchrotron diffraction experiments under both monochromatic and energy-dispersive conditions. Compact, high-performance readout systems have been realized using modern FPGA system-on-chip technology, integrating multi-core processors with large gate arrays for real-time data handling. This work will discuss the technical implementation of these systems and present some recent results. Recent developments in novel germanium sensor geometries, including drift detectors and hybrid imaging platform, will also be discussed.