Contributed paper Detector commissioning and development for PETRA-III DAVID PENNICARD † , HEINZ GRAAFSMA AND MICHAEL LOHMANN DESY, Notkestraße 85, Hamburg 22607, Germany (Received 14 June 2010; accepted 10 August 2010) The new synchrotron light source PETRA-III produced its first beam last year. The extremely high brilliance of PETRA-III and the large energy range of many of its beamlines make it useful for a wide range of experiments, particularly in materials science. The detectors at PETRA-III will need to meet several requirements, such as operation across a wide dynamic range, high-speed readout and good quantum efficiency even at high photon energies. PETRA-III beamlines with lower photon energies will typically be equipped with photon-counting silicon detectors for two-dimensional detection and silicon drift detectors for spectroscopy and higher-energy beamlines will use scintillators coupled to cameras or photomulti- plier tubes. Longer-term developments include ‘high-Z’ semiconductors for detect- ing high-energy X-rays, photon-counting readout chips with smaller pixels and higher frame rates and pixellated avalanche photodiodes for time-resolved experiments. 1. PETRA-III The storage ring PETRA at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), which was previously used as a pre-accelerator in particle physics experiments, has recently been reconstructed as a third-generation light source (Balewski et al. 2004). PETRA-III operates at a relatively high positron beam energy of 6 GeV and currently is the lowest-emittance synchrotron light source in the world. The first user operation began in October 2009 and the commissioning of the 14 first-phase beamlines continues. A full list of beamlines is available in Franz et al. (2006). The PETRA-III beamlines have the following features: large energy ranges (one beamline can operate at 150 keV and three others at 50 keV or greater); high resolution (in space, energy or q-space); and high coherence. For materials science, the large energy range is par- ticularly important, because it makes it possible to investigate large or strongly absorbing samples. In addition to using X-ray scattering to study the bulk proper- ties of material samples, microfocusing of the beam will make it possible to probe buried interfaces within samplesor map variations in sample structure. Similarly, † Email address for correspondence: david.pennicard@desy.de Diamond Light Source Proceedings, Vol 1, e102, page 1 of 4 © Diamond Light Source Ltd 2010 SRMS-7 2010 doi:10.1017/S2044820110000043 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2044820110000043 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 207.241.231.83, on 26 Jul 2018 at 05:00:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at