 Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence. http://pos.sissa.it Experience and Results from the 6 Megapixel PILATUS System Anna Bergamaschi, Christian Broennimann, Eric Eikenberry, Beat Henrich 1 , Miroslav Kobas, Philipp Kraft, Bernd Schmitt Paul Scherrer Institut 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland PILATUS detector systems operate in single photon counting mode and are based on the newly developed hybrid-pixel technology [8], [9], [10] and [11]. The main difference to existing detectors is that X-rays are directly transformed into electric charge and processed in the CMOS readout chips. This design shows no leakage current or readout noise and leads to a high dynamic range of 1,000,000 (20 bits) per pixel, short readout times of less than 3.5 ms, a high framing rate of over 200 images per second and an excellent point-spread function. The quantum efficiency of the 0.32 mm thick silicon sensor is optimal for experiments in the energy range from 3 to 15 keV, however the detectors can be used for energies of up to 40 keV. Using the paralyzable counter model a dead time of 200.4 ns (standard gain settings) was measured [7]. This leads to a counting rate of almost 2x10 6 photons/pixels/s, well suited to handle the high flux of modern synchrotron light sources. Keywords: Hybrid pixel detector, Single Photon Counting, Macromolecular Crystallography The 16th International Workshop on Vertex detectors Lake Placid, NY, USA 23-28 September, 2007 1 Speaker