Thin scintillators for ultrafast hard X-ray imaging

Abstract

A multilayer thin-scintillator concept is described for ultrafast imaging. The individual layer thickness is determined by the spatial resolution and light attenuation length, the number of layers is determined by the overall efficiency. By coating the scintillators with a high quantum-efficiency photocathode, single X-ray photon detection can be achieved using fast scintillators with low light yield. The fast, efficient sensors, when combined with MCP and novel nanostructed electron amplification schemes, is a possible way towards GHz hard X-ray cameras for a few frames of images.