Light with charge-coupled devices

An x-ray area detector can be used to collect the intensities of many reflections at a time. The crystal must be oriented in many different settings with respect to the incident beam but the detector needs to be positioned at only a few positions to collect all of the data. A charge coupled device (CCD) is used as the area detector on the Siemens SMART single crystal diffractometer system. The SMART detector consists of a flat 6-cm circular phosphorescent screen that converts x-ray photons to visible light photons. The screen is coupled to a tapered fiber optics bundle which is then coupled to a one inch by one inch square CCD chip. The CCD chip has 1024 x 1024 pixels each of which stores an electrical charge proportional to the number of... 

Finally, the introduction of new detectors, such as diode arrays and charge-coupled devices (CCDs), has been a boon for Raman spectroscopy. CCDs permit the accumulation of light in the manner of photographic film additionally, their noise level is lower than that of the photomultiplier tube. In addition, by combining CCDs or diode arrays with optical dispersive elements, entire spectra mav be collected in fractions of a second. 

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