Characterizations of the electrothermal parameters of a transition edge sensor microcalorimeter and its energy resolution

Abstract

We developed a transition-edge sensor microcalorimeter (μ-calorimeter) using Mo/Au/Au thin films. We report the detector fabrication, the measurements of the electrothermal parameters and the noise characterizations of the transition-edge sensor μ-calorimeters. We estimated the energy resolution of the μ-calorimeter using the measured noise spectrum and the calculated power-to-current responsivity. Using a ⁵⁵Fe radioactive X-ray source, we characterized the detector responses to incident photons at various working points. The best instrumental energy resolution achieved was 4.13 eV @ 5.9 keV, which agrees qualitatively with the resolution of 4.01 eV estimated from the noise spectrum.