ABSTRACT
With the improving energy resolution of transitionedge sensor (TES) based microcalorimeters, performance verification and calibration of these detectors has become increasingly challenging, especially in the energy range below 1 keV where fluorescent atomic X-ray lines have linewidths that are wider than the detector energy resolution and require impractically high statistics to determine the gain and deconvolve the instrumental profile. Better behaved calibration sources such as grating monochromators are too cumbersome for space missions and are difficult to use in the lab. As an alternative, we are exploring the use of pulses of 3 eV optical photons delivered by an optical fiber to generate combs of known energies with known arrival times. Here, we discuss initial results of this technique obtained with 2 eV and 0.7 eV resolution X-ray microcalorimeters. With the 2 eV detector, we have achieved photon number resolution for pulses with mean photon number up to 133 (corresponding to 0.4 keV).
ABSTRACT
We have specialized astronomical applications for X-ray microcalorimeters with superconducting transition edge sensors (TESs) that require exceptionally good TES performance, but which operate in the small-signal regime. We have therefore begun a program to carefully characterize the entire transition surface of TESs with and without the usual zebra stripes to see if there are reproducible local "sweet spots" where the performance is much better than average. These measurements require precise knowledge of the circuit parameters. Here, we show how the Shapiro effect can be used to precisely calibrate the value of the shunt-resistor. We are also investigating the effects of stress and external magnetic fields to better understand reproducibility problems.
