Development of a filtered AXUV diode array for X-pinch soft x-ray spectra in the energy range of 1–10 keV

We develop a filtered absolute extreme ultraviolet (AXUV) diode array to measure the time evolution of the soft x-ray spectrum in the energy range of 1–10 keV. AXUV–HS5, the detector, has a fast rise time of 0.7 ns, a wide energy detection range, and high accessibility. We use Geant4 simulations to design an appropriate filter set for flat-and-sharp virtual channels (VCs), where a filter with no spectral edge removes large tails of the response curves. A Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) method, sensitive to the expected spectral function, is improved to reliably generate a continuous radiation spectrum, by utilizing spectral information from the least-squares (LS) method that reconstructs a discrete spectrum with low spectral resolution directly from the VCs. We test the filtered AXUV diode array on an X-pinch device with a peak current of 140 kA at Seoul National University; the array with ten channels is installed in a vacuum chamber. For a two-wire 40 μm stainless steel X-pinch, x-ray power, radiation temperature, and the reconstructed x-ray spectrum are obtained from the filtered AXUV diode array by the combined LS–LM method.