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Abstract

The European X-Rays Free-Electron Laser (XFEL.EU) is a new X-ray facility built in the Hamburg metropolitan area. It is the most largest and brilliant coherent X-ray source ever built. The machine is able to provide to the end-stations trains of 2700 X-ray pulses with 222ns (4.5 MHz) separation time between each other; the trains are repeated every 0.1 s. In order to perform scientific experiments using the X-rays provided by the machine, the XFEL.EU commissioned three new detector projects able to match the characteristic XFEL.EU time structure and to implement the high demanding requirements defined by the scientific community. One of these three projects is the DSSC (DEPFET Sensor with Signal Compression) detector project. The DSSC is the imaging detector prepared for soft X-ray instruments at XFEL.EU. It is a one-million pixel camera able to acquire up to 800 consecutive images in a train, with a 4.5 MHz frame rate. The DSSC is designed to reach a single photon sensitivity at 1 keV together with a high dynamic range. To reach these requirements, the detector was originally designed to use the non-linear DEPFET sensors, which implement an internal signal compression. However, in its first version the DSSC uses more conventional mini silicon drift detector (Mini-SDD) pixel arrays. The signal compression can be realized in the first amplification stage of the front-end electronics. The DSSC 1M pixel camera is composed of 16 units, each called a DSSC ladder. The goal of the work of this thesis was to integrate, bring into operation and perform the first characterization of the DSSC ladder systems implementing two different types of sensors, DEPFET and Mini-SDD. A DSSC ladder equipped with DEPFET sensors was tested with pulsed visible light, emulating the XFEL.EU timing structure. A DSSC ladder equipped with Mini-SDD sensors was tested in a dedicated vacuum setup at the soft X-ray beamline P04 at Petra III, DESY. In both cases, the detectors were successfully brought into operation, measurements were performed and the detector was characterized. However, due to the performances of the first version of the full-size ASIC, the detector could not reach the target specification defined for operation at XFEL.EU. This is expected to be improved with the second version of the ASIC.

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