Compact Photon Counting Detector for single crystal X-ray diffraction

HyPix-Bantam

The HyPix-Bantam detector is a next-generation two-dimensional semiconductor detector designed specifically to meet the needs of the home lab diffractionist. The HyPix-Bantam is a Hybrid Photon Counting (HPC) X-ray detector with an active area of approximately 3000mm², a small pixel size of 100 um x 100 um and a high count rate of greater than 10⁶ cps/pixel. A big advantage of the HPC X-ray detectors is that each pixel is independent and the overall dynamic range of a detector is a sum of the dynamic range of each individual pixel. Each pixel in the HyPix-Bantam has two 16-bit counters, and these can be combined to work as a single 31-bit counter achieving very wide dynamic range. Another benefit of HPC X-ray detectors is the extremely low background noise and high sensitivity meaning that even low photon counts are detected. The combination of all these features means that images with both strong and weak reflections present are measured extremely accurately without the need to do a second pass of reciprocal space in order to recollect the image at a lower exposure time. The HyPix-Bantam allows data to be collected very quickly due to its high sensitivity and dynamic range.