Spectroscopic performances of a very large area silicon drift detector

Silicon drift detectors (SDD) are known to reach extreme performances in spectroscopy applications but these devices have small active area (few cm(2) at most). We are involved in the development of very-large active area SDDs (53 cm(2)) dedicated to tracking with high position resolution in a very-high particle multiplicity environment. Here we present preliminary experimental results on X-ray spectra measured with front-end electronics optimized for energy resolution. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved