"A High Speed Fluorescence Microprobe System"

Robin Kirkham, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia

CSIRO and the NSLS are jointly developing a new, high-speed detector system optimised for Synchrotron X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (SXRF) imaging. The Maia detector system will couple the annular 384-element planar silicon detector array and advanced front-end and signal processing chips developed at BNL with CSIRO's HYMOD2 gate-array data processing hardware, parallel/pipeline programming languages, and SXRF elemental deconvolution techniques. The close integration of the detector system with the sample scanning stage and other beamline sensors will provide order-of-magnitude improvements in the speed and quality of SXRF and XANES imaging. We report on results to date from prototype detectors, and the design of the full Maia detector systems, due to be installed at the NSLS and the Australian Synchrotron in the new year.