Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 22: Superconductivity – Poster I

TT 22.30: Poster

Monday, March 9, 2026, 18:00–20:00, P1

Towards large-area 256-pixel MMC arrays for high resolution X-ray spectroscopy — •Andreas Abeln, Daniel Hengstler, Lucas Herbstritt, Daniel Kreuzberger, Andreas Reifenberger, Andreas Fleischmann, Loredana Gastaldo, and Christian Enss — Kirchhoff Institute for Physics, Heidelberg University

Metallic Magnetic Calorimeters (MMCs) are energy-dispersive cryogenic particle detectors. Operated at temperatures below 50 mK, they provide very good energy resolution, high quantum efficiency as well as high linearity over a large energy range. In many precision experiments in X-ray spectroscopy the photon flux is small, thus a large active detection area is desirable. Therefore, we develop arrays with increasing number of pixels.

In this contribution we present a detector setup featuring a novel dense-packed 16×16 pixel MMC array. The pixels provide a total active area of 4 mm×4 mm and are equipped with 5 µm thick absorbers made of gold. This ensures a stopping power of at least 50 % for photon energies up to 20 keV. The expected energy resolution is 1.4 eV (FWHM) at an operating temperature of 20 mK. For the cost-effective read-out of the 128 detector channels we envisage the flux-ramp multiplexing technique. We present first results of the detector characterization obtained utilizing parallel 2-stage dc-SQUID read-out chains. We discuss the detector performance, focusing on the thermal behavior within the detector as well as to the thermal bath.

Keywords: Metallic Magnetic Calorimeter; X-ray spectroscopy; SQUID multiplexing; Microfabrication; Cryogenics