Development of single photon counting detectors at the Swiss Light Source

To optimally use the high flux delivered by current, third-generation synchrotron radiation sources like the Swiss Light Source at the Paul Scherrer Institute two detector systems are currently being developed. The Mythen detector system is a one-dimensional 15k channel microstrip detector for powder diffraction. It allows major improvement in time-resolved powder diffraction due to its massively parallel detection of X-rays and fast readout. The Pilatus detector is a 2k × 2k pixel detector for protein crystallography. Its advantages compared to current state-of-the-art CCDs are a much better signal-to-noise ratio, a point spread function of 1 pixel and a very short readout time of 6.7 ms. This allows data to be taken in fine φ-slicing mode which will improve the data quality.