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Modern photon‐counting pixel detectors have enabled a revolution in applications at synchrotron light sources and beyond in the last decade. One of the limitations of the current detectors is their reduced counting linearity or even paralysis at high counting rates, due to dead‐time which results in photon pile‐up. Existing dead‐time and pile‐up models fail to reproduce the complexity of dead‐time effects on photon‐counting, resulting in empirical calibrations for particular detectors at best, imprecise linearization methods, or no linearization. This problem will increase in the future as many synchrotron light sources plan significant brilliance upgrades and free‐electron lasers plan moving to a quasi‐continuous operation mode. Presented here are the first models that use the actual behavior of the analog pre‐amplifiers in spectroscopic photon‐counting pixel detectors with constant current discharge (e.g. the Medipix and CPix families of detectors) to deduce more accurate analytical models and optimal linearization methods. In particular, for detectors with at least two counters per pixel, the need for calibration, or previous knowledge of the detector and beam parameters (dead‐time, integration time, large sets of synchrotron filling patterns), is completely eliminated. This is summarized in several models of increasing complexity and accuracy. Finally, a general empirical approach is presented, applicable to any particular cases where the analytical approach is not sufficiently precise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Medipix3RX is the latest version of the Medipix3 photon counting ASICs, which implements two new operational modes, with respect to the Medipix2 ASIC, aimed at eliminating charge shared events (referred to as Charge Summing Mode (CSM)) and at providing spectroscopic information (referred to as Colour Mode (CM)). The Medipix3RX is a redesign of the Medipix3v0 ASIC and corrects for the underperformance of CSM features observed in the previous version. This paper presents the results from synchrotron X-rays tests to evaluate the Medipix3RX ASIC performance. The newly implemented CSM algorithm eliminates the charge sharing effect at the same time as allocating the event to the readout pixel corresponding to the sensor pixel where the X-ray photon impinged. The new pixel trimming circuit led to a reduced dispersion between pixels. Further results of the linearity for all the gain modes, energy resolution and pixel uniformity are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]