Micro-Channel Plate (MCP) Capacitive Division Imaging Readout (CDIR) detector for FLIM

The Photek Capacitive Division Imaging Readout (CDIR) detector, is a Microchannel Plate (MCP) vacuum detector that can detect photons with both spatial resolution and a very high timing resolution of the order of 100 ps. The CDIR detector, capacitively couples the charge output of the MCP electron multipliers on a readout geometry, which shares the collected charge between four readout nodes at each corner. The charge collected at each node is then measured using the NINO ASIC, a charge sensitive amplifier/discriminator, and the HPTDC ASIC, a high time resolution time-to-digital convertor, allowing the charge position to be calculated using a centroiding imaging algorithm. The system is currently been developed by Photek Ltd, Phil Birch and Roger Phillips of the Sussex Centre form Advanced Microscopy. A second arm uses Lumintek's VGA Vision EMCCD camera for intensity imaging, results can be seen here.

The detector has been intergrated into our custom build SPIM (Single plane illumination microscope) pictured below.

SPIM Illumination arm - the sample holder has been removed

For more details contact Dr Phil Birch