Wide-field imaging spectrometer for ESA's future x-ray mission: XEUS

ESA's future x-ray mission, the x-ray evolving ESA's future x-ray mission, the x-ray evolving universe spectroscopy mission (XEUS) is actually under study as a potential successor of the XMM satellite. Its collecting area for x- rays form 100 eV up to 20 eV will be about 200 times larger than compared to XMM. The angular resolution will be improved by a factor of five. The field of view will eventually be as large as 10 arcmin. Novel wide field images are needed to overcome the limitations by the state-of-the- art CCD type detectors, limited due to the high number of x- rays focused into the focal plane. To face the problem of high count rate and large formats with simultaneous good energy resolution and high quantum efficiency we have proposed two new focal plane x-ray detectors: (a) a back illuminated active pixel sensor and (b) a 200 readout channel back illuminated frame store pn-CCD. Both will be fabricated at the MPI semiconductor lab on 500 micrometers high resistivity silicon.