A Novel Energy-Resolved X-Ray Semiconductor Detector

The hyperspectral X-ray imaging has long been sought in various fields from material analysis to medical diagnosis. Here we propose a new semiconductor detector structure to realize energy-resolved imaging at potentially low cost. The device is designed based on the strong energy-dependent absorption of X-ray in solids. Namely, depending on the energy, X-ray photons experience dramatically different attenuation. An array or matrix of semiconductor cells is used to map the X-ray intensity along its trajectory. With known X-ray attenuation coefficient, the X-ray spectrum could be extracted from a Laplace like transform or a supervised machine learning. We conceptually demonstrated an energy-resolved X-ray detection with a regular silicon camera.