An investigation into the use of filters as a means of enhancing the performance of solid state detectors for extended x‐ray absorption fine structure

Selectively absorbing x‐ray filters have been widely used with scintillation detectors to provide some degree of energy discrimination and hence improve the signal/noise ratio [E. Stern and S. Heald, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 50, 1579 (1979); J. Baines, D. Garner, S. Hasnain, and C. Morrell, Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 266, 565 (1988)]. Solid state detectors, with their intrinsic high resolution, do not require filtration for energy discrimination as pulses can be collected solely from a window set on the energy of interest. However, these detectors have maximum count rates, limited by the signal processing electronics, typically a decade smaller than those for scintillators, which severely limits their ability to exploit the high intensities provided by synchrotron radiation sources. This limitation can be minimized by increasing the number of detector elements [S. Cramer, O. Tench, M. Yocum, and G. George, Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 266, 586 (1988)], by faster signal processing [G. Derbyshire, R. Farrow, R. Bilsborrow, C. Morrell, N. Greaves, and B. Dobson, Adv. X‐Ray Anal. 34], or a combination of both. The first solution eventually becomes both unwieldy and prohibitively expensive and there is a limit to the improvements that can be made to the second, which is still likely to be below the intensities provided by the next generation of synchrotron sources. A filter in combination with a multielement solid state detector array can significantly enhance its performance at negligible cost.