Ti/Au TES 32 × 32 Pixel Array
By Emanuele Taralli
The main purpose of this paper is to report on the status of the backup option for the detector technology for the X-IFU instrument using an SRON kilo-pixels array consisting of a 32x32 Ti/Au transition-edge sensor (TES). In particular, in this work, we show uniformity, performance at different photon energies and impact of the thermal cross-talk of such array. The Uniformity of critical temperature and thus energy resolution is a crucial aspect in a large array in order to reach a high quality of the fabrication process; the performance at different phonon energies need to meet the requirement because the main goal of Athena is to resolve energy lines in a spectrum between 0.2 and 12 keV. The impact of the thermal cross-talk must be negligible in order to avoid that the detection of a photon from a pixels does not affect the performance of the neighbour pixels (for this particular aspect, newer and better results will be published soon in IEEE Trans. appl. supercond.).