Charge sharing in silicon pixel detectors

We used a pixellated hybrid silicon X-ray detector to study the effect of the sharing of generated charge between neighbouring pixels over a range of incident X-ray energies, 13-36 keV. The system is a room temperature, energy resolving detector with a Gaussian FWHM of 265 eV at 5.9 keV. Each pixel is 300 mu m square, 300 mu m deep and is bump bonded to matching read out electronics. The modelling packages MEDICI and MCNP were used to model the complete X-ray interaction and the subsequent charge transport. Using this software a model is developed which reproduces well the experimental results. The simulations are then altered to explore smaller pixel sizes and different X-ray energies. Charge sharing was observed experimentally to be 2% at 13 keV rising to 4.5% at 36 keV, for an energy threshold of 4 keV. The models predict that up to 50% of charge may be lost to the neighbouring pixels, for an X-ray energy of 36 keV, when the pixel size is reduced to 55 mu m.