Large Area Flat Panel Photon Counting Imaging Detectors for Astronomy and Night Time Sensing

The development of large area, high performance, photon counting, imaging, timing detectors based on novel microchannel plate technology potentially offers significant advantages in a number of applications. To explore this, large area (20 cm) microchannel plates have been constructed using borosilicate microcapillary arrays (20 μm pores) activated by atomic layer deposition. These microchannel plates have demonstrated gain equivalent to conventional microchannel plates, have low background rates (0.07 events cm sec), good gain uniformity (10%) and very good lifetime stability (to 7 C cm) when using appropriate secondary emissive coatings. Tests with various readout schemes have been done, achieving high thoughput rates of up to 5 MHz and spatial resolution sufficient to resolve individual 20 μm pores. A full process run has been accomplished with a 20 cm format sealed tube configuration. This included deposition of a 20 cm bialkali photocathode with peak quantum efficiency of ~25% at 350 nm, good stability and ±15% uniformity over the active area. Post process testing demonstrates event time determination better than 200 ps FWHM.