 | |
| Industry | Electrical equipment |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Baden-Dättwil, Switzerland |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Matthias Schneebeli (CEO) |
| Products | X-ray detectors |
Number of employees | 130 (2021) [1] |
| Website | www |
Dectris Ltd (German : Dectris AG, French, Italian, Romansh : Dectris SA) is a Swiss company producing photon counting X-ray detectors. These are used in synchrotrons worldwide [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] as well as in laboratory imaging. [7]
Dectris was founded in 2006 as a spin-off company by Christian Brönnimann, a researcher at the Paul Scherrer Institute, and three colleagues, Eric F. Eikenberry, Markus Näf, and Petr Salficky. [8] In 2007, the company sold its first detector unit in the PILATUS series. In 2008 the MYTHEN detector was introduced followed by the EIGER in 2015. [9] In January 2022, Christian Brönnimann, who had been CEO since 2006, stepped down and Matthias Schneebeli (CTO since 2017) became the new CEO. [10] [11]
Dectris mainly develops and produces hybrid photon counting X-ray detectors. Three different product lines have been launched which all take their names from Swiss mountains, Pilatus, Mythen, and Eiger. All detectors use direct detection, meaning that X-ray photons are directly converted to electron-hole pairs instead of using visible light as an intermediary. This improves efficiency significantly and enables much higher count rates. [12]
In recent years Dectris has developed and started producing electron detectors. [9]
DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national research centre for fundamental science located in Hamburg and Zeuthen near Berlin in Germany. It operates particle accelerators used to investigate the structure, dynamics and function of matter, and conducts a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary scientific research in four main areas: particle and high energy physics; photon science; astroparticle physics; and the development, construction and operation of particle accelerators. Its name refers to its first project, an electron synchrotron. DESY is publicly financed by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Federal States of Hamburg and Brandenburg and is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres.
X-ray fluorescence (XRF) is the emission of characteristic "secondary" X-rays from a material that has been excited by being bombarded with high-energy X-rays or gamma rays. The phenomenon is widely used for elemental analysis and chemical analysis, particularly in the investigation of metals, glass, ceramics and building materials, and for research in geochemistry, forensic science, archaeology and art objects such as paintings.
A synchrotron light source is a source of electromagnetic radiation (EM) usually produced by a storage ring, for scientific and technical purposes. First observed in synchrotrons, synchrotron light is now produced by storage rings and other specialized particle accelerators, typically accelerating electrons. Once the high-energy electron beam has been generated, it is directed into auxiliary components such as bending magnets and insertion devices in storage rings and free electron lasers. These supply the strong magnetic fields perpendicular to the beam that are needed to convert high energy electrons into photons.
A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator, descended from the cyclotron, in which the accelerating particle beam travels around a fixed closed-loop path. The magnetic field which bends the particle beam into its closed path increases with time during the accelerating process, being synchronized to the increasing kinetic energy of the particles. The synchrotron is one of the first accelerator concepts to enable the construction of large-scale facilities, since bending, beam focusing and acceleration can be separated into different components. The most powerful modern particle accelerators use versions of the synchrotron design. The largest synchrotron-type accelerator, also the largest particle accelerator in the world, is the 27-kilometre-circumference (17 mi) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, built in 2008 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It can accelerate beams of protons to an energy of 6.5 tera electronvolts (TeV or 1012 eV).
The Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is a storage-ring-based high-energy X-ray light source facility. It is one of five X-ray light sources owned and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The APS began operation on March 26, 1995. It is operated as a user facility, meaning that it is open to the world’s scientific community, and more than 5,500 researchers make use of its resources each year.
X-ray spectroscopy is a general term for several spectroscopic techniques for characterization of materials by using x-ray radiation.
Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager was a NASA solar flare observatory. It was the sixth mission in the Small Explorer program (SMEX), selected in October 1997 and launched on 5 February 2002, at 20:58:12 UTC. Its primary mission was to explore the physics of particle acceleration and energy release in solar flares.
The CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) is an experiment in astroparticle physics to search for axions originating from the Sun. The experiment, sited at CERN in Switzerland, was commissioned in 1999 and came online in 2002 with the first data-taking run starting in May 2003. The successful detection of solar axions would constitute a major discovery in particle physics, and would also open up a brand new window on the astrophysics of the solar core.
A diffractometer is a measuring instrument for analyzing the structure of a material from the scattering pattern produced when a beam of radiation or particles interacts with it.
The National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York was a national user research facility funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Built from 1978 through 1984, and officially shut down on September 30, 2014, the NSLS was considered a second-generation synchrotron.
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a research facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. One of the world's brightest sources of ultraviolet and soft x-ray light, the ALS is the first "third-generation" synchrotron light source in its energy range, providing multiple extremely bright sources of intense and coherent short-wavelength light for use in scientific experiments by researchers from around the world. It is funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and operated by the University of California. In June 2018, Stephen Kevan became the director of the ALS.
An X-ray microscope uses electromagnetic radiation in the soft X-ray band to produce images of very small objects.
PILATUS is the name of a series of x-ray detectors originally developed by the Paul Scherrer Institute at the Swiss Light Source and further developed and commercialized by DECTRIS. The PILATUS detectors are based on hybrid photon counting (HPC) technology, by which X-rays are converted to electrical signals by the photoelectric effect in a semiconductor sensor layer—either silicon or cadmium telluride—which is subject to a substantial bias voltage. The electric signals are counted directly by a series of cells in an ASIC bonded to the sensor. Each cell—or pixel—is a complete detector in itself, equipped with an amplifier, discriminator and counter circuit. This is possible thanks to contemporary CMOS integrated circuit technology.
Rigaku Corporation is an international manufacturer and distributor of scientific, analytical and industrial instrumentation specializing in X-ray related technologies, including X-ray crystallography, X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray reflectivity, X-ray fluorescence (XRF), automation, cryogenics and X-ray optics.
A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams.
Resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) is an advanced X-ray spectroscopy technique.
Gerhard Theodor Materlik is a German physicist and science manager. He has made significant contributions to X-ray physics, notably improvements in the real-world application of synchrotron radiation. He is a Professor of Facilities Science at the University College London since 2013.
Diffraction-limited storage rings (DLSR), or ultra-low emittance storage rings, are synchrotron light sources where the emittance of the electron-beam in the storage ring is smaller or comparable to the emittance of the x-ray photon beam they produce at the end of their insertion devices. These facilities operate in the soft to hard x-ray range (100eV—100keV) with extremely high brilliance (in the order of 1021—1022 photons/s/mm2/mrad2/0.1%BW)
Hybrid pixel detectors are a type of ionizing radiation detector consisting of an array of diodes based on semiconductor technology and their associated electronics. The term “hybrid” stems from the fact that the two main elements from which these devices are built, the semiconductor sensor and the readout chip, are manufactured independently and later electrically coupled by means of a bump-bonding process. Ionizing particles are detected as they produce electron-hole pairs through their interaction with the sensor element, usually made of doped silicon or cadmium telluride. The readout ASIC is segmented into pixels containing the necessary electronics to amplify and measure the electrical signals induced by the incoming particles in the sensor layer.
DORIS was an electron–positron storage ring at the German national laboratory DESY. It was DESY's second circular accelerator and its first storage ring, with a circumference of nearly 300 m. After construction was completed in 1974, DORIS provided collision experiments with electrons and their antiparticles at energies of 3.5 GeV per beam. In 1978, the energy of the beams was raised to 5 GeV each.
Today, we have 130 employees in three countries (Switzerland, the USA, and Japan)