An X-ray TES Detector Head Assembly for a STEM–EDS System and Its Performance

A detector head for an energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) for a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) was designed, fabricated, and tested. A 64-pixel TES X-ray microcalorimeter and 64 SQUID array amplifiers (SAAs) are mounted on a detector head which is cooled to about 100 mK. The body of the detector head is a copper rod of about 1cm2 cross section and 10 cm length with 3 cm cubic structure at the bottom. The TES microcalorimeter is mounted at the top of the rod while the SAAs are mounted on the four side surfaces of the cubic structure. In order to reduce the number of wire bondings, we adopted a flip-chip bonding for the SAAs. In order to reduce the stress imposed on the flip-chip bondings due to the difference in the linear thermal expansion of the SAA chip and the mounting surfaces, we mounted the SAAs and connectors to the room-temperature electronics on sapphire circuit board and mounted the SAAs and connectors using a superconducting flip-chip bonding technology. Then, both the TES and the sapphire circuit board were mounted on the rod and are connected to the print circuit like superconducting wires, which are created on the multiple surfaces of the rod, with Al wire bondings. We reduced the number of wire bondings from 768 to 256. The yield of the flip-chip bonding was not perfect but relatively high. We installed the detector head in the STEM EDS system, confirmed that the energy resolution and counting requirements, ΔE<10eV with 5 kcps were fulfilled.