Institut für Astronomie und Astrophysik Abteilung Astronomie Sand 1, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany
Hinweis: Einige Seiten auf astro.uni-tuebingen.de können veraltet sein und werden nicht mehr aktualisiert. Note: Some webpages at astro.uni-tuebingen.de may be outdated and will no longer be updated.

Preprint 07/99

The influence of optical light on the charge transfer efficiency of the XMM EPIC pn­CCD camera

J.Pal (1), M.Kuster (1), E. Kendziorra (1), N. Krause (2)

(1) Institut für Astronomie und Astrophysik, Astronomie, Universität Tübingen, Waldhäuser Str. 64, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany
(2) Max­Planck­Institut für extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), Giessenbachstrasse, D­85740 Garching, Germany

To appear in: Proc. SPIE, "EUV, X-ray and Gamma Ray Instrumentation for Astronomy X", Vol. 3765, Oswald H. Siegmund, Kathryn A. Flanagan, ed., 1999

Abstract. The European X­ray satellite XMM will be launched in December 1999. One of the focal plane instruments of the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) on board XMM is equipped with a monolithic pn­CCD consisting of 12 individual CCDs with 200 x 64 pixels each. In order to exploit the good intrinsic energy resolution of the pn­CCD, the charge transfer efficiency (CTE) must be well known. Impurities in the wafer material act as traps for electrons, thus removing a fraction of the signal charge at each transfer step towards the readout anode. Electrons generated by optical light from the observed source or other optical sources may well saturate those traps, which results in a different CTE for X­ray generated charge packets. Using single CCDs of flight type, we have analyzed in our test facility at the Institut für Astronomie und Astrophysik der Universität Tübingen (IAAT), the influence of optical light on the CTE of the pn­CCD. In this paper we describe the results of our investigation of the CTE at different X­ray energies and varying optical light intensities.

Key words: XMM, ABRIXAS, pn­CCD, X­ray detector, charge transfer efficiency

Paper (588k gzip'ed Postscript including figures)

[Home Page] [Preprints 1999] [Quick Reference] [Feedback]

| Impressum Last modified 14 Nov 2002