An important and developing protein-crystallography field is time-resolved crystallography using synchrotrons. Dynamic crystallography, however, imposes challenging requirements on detectors. As with other areas of crystallography, the x-ray sources are advancing much more rapidly than the detector technologies. This application describes a very advanced detector that will be particularly useful for time-resolved Laue diffraction studies. The detector is called the High Speed Crystallography Detector (HSCD). The HSCD is a room-temperature, large-area, high-spatial- resolution, high-speed, adjustable-frame-rate detector with very high sensitivity (a near-one Detective Quantum Efficiency [DQE], for a single x-ray photon). The HSCD offers orders of magnitude improvement over current time-resolved two-dimensional crystallography detectors. The HSCD will have an adjustable integration time of 30 ns to I ms and is capable of storing up to 200 consecutive frames.
Commercial high-volume facilities for all the HSCD fabrication processes already exist and detector cost should be very reasonable. The expectation is that the HSCD will support existing research and accelerate developments in time-resolved crystallography.
