Percival: An International Collaboration to Develop a MAPS-based Soft X-ray Imager

Over the last decade, synchrotron radiation sources have seen a significant increase in brilliance, and the advent of free electron lasers has made entire new research fields accessible to investigations with X-rays. These advances in light source capabilities have resulted not only in a host of scientific advances and discoveries, but also in a need for a new generation of X-ray imaging detectors that can match the sources' capabilities in terms of frame rate and image dynamic range while recording image information with fine granularity over a large – preferably uninterrupted – (multi)megapixel area with single-photon sensitivity. Developing such next-generation imagers is both costly and time-consuming, and the requirements at many photon science facilities are similar enough to invite a collaborative effort. The Percival (“Pixellated Energy Resolving CMOS Imager, Versatile And Large”) imager is being developed by a collaboration of DESY, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), Elettra, and Diamond Light Source (DLS) to answer this need for the soft X-ray regime.