CCD saturation in high-background environments

Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are nowadays preferred X-ray detectors in environments with high-background radiation. The maximum number of X-ray counts per exposure in a CCD-detector is limited by saturation. The simulation of this effect reproduces well the measurements with a 55Fe source. In an accelerator area, where a large amount of charged particles is present, a strong reduction of X-ray recognition efficiency with increasing occupancy (percentage of hit pixels) is observed which depends only weakly on the specific distribution of cluster sizes.