Micro-Calorimeters

As a graduate student in the X-ray Astrophysics Group at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I played a major role in the development of quantum X-ray calorimeters as the next-generation X-ray spectrometers. These are photon counting devices. The deposited energy of each photon is inferred from a tiny temperature rise (a few micro-Kelvin) in the detectors. The micro-calorimeters possess far superior energy resolution compared to the CCDs that were used as the primary spectrometer in X-ray astronomy over the last decade. They also have much higher quantum efficiency than state-of-the art gratings (employed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and XMM-Newton Observatory). The micro-calorimeters have been successfully tested on sounding rockets flights, and have been chosen for several future missions (such as Astro-E2 and Constellation-X).