Assessment of the Imaging Performance of the CITIUS High-Resolution Detector for Heavy Charged Particles and Neutrons

Abstract

We report on the assessment of the imaging performance of CITIUS -- a high-speed X-ray detector developed for the large-scale synchrotron radiation facility SPring-8-II -- for heavy charged particles and neutrons. To characterize the detector response, an irradiation experiment was performed using alpha particles from an $^{241}$Am source at four back-bias voltages of 400V, 300 V, 200 V, and 170 V, thereby controlling the amount of charge diffusion. A Geant4 model of the experiment was constructed, and four model parameters were determined by template fitting to the measured signal cluster shape distributions. The best-fit values are: an intrinsic energy spread of 5% for the source, a gold fraction of 0.4 for the Au-Pd coating, a lateral charge diffusion spread of 26.5 $μ$m over a drift distance of 650 $μ$m at 400V back-bias, and a per-pixel readout noise of 10000 $e^{-}$ in the medium-gain channel. Using the obtained sensor model, simulations were performed for 4 MeV alpha particles and cold neutrons to evaluate the expected spatial resolution. In both cases, simulated CITIUS, when operated in a gain-selecting mode between high and medium gains, yields a substantial improvement: at a pixel size of 70 $μ$m for example, the resolution improves from 9.1 $μ$m to 1.2 $μ$m for alpha particles, and from 26 $μ$m to 1.9 $μ$m for cold neutrons. These results suggest that two key features of CITIUS -- its gain-selecting architecture and the substantial charge sharing enabled by the long carrier drift distance -- extend its imaging capabilities beyond X-rays to heavy charged particles and neutrons.