Radiation damage of the PCO Pixelfly VGA CCD camera of the BES system on KSTAR tokamak

A PCO Pixelfly VGA CCD camera which is part a of the Beam Emission Spectroscopy (BES) diagnostic system of the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) used for spatial calibrations, suffered from serious radiation damage, white pixel defects have been generated in it. The main goal of this work was to identify the origin of the radiation damage and to give solutions to avoid it. Monte Carlo N-Particle eXtended (MCNPX) model was built using Monte Carlo Modeling Interface Program (MCAM) and calculations were carried out to predict the neutron and gamma-ray fields in the camera position. Besides the MCNPX calculations pure gamma-ray irradiations of the CCD camera were carried out in the Training Reactor of BME. Before, during and after the irradiations numerous frames were taken with the camera with 5 s long exposure times. The evaluation of these frames showed that with the applied high gamma-ray dose (1.7 Gy) and dose rate levels (up to 2 Gy/h) the number of the white pixels did not increase. We have found that the origin of the white pixel generation was the neutron-induced thermal hopping of the electrons which means that in the future only neutron shielding is necessary around the CCD camera. Another solution could be to replace the CCD camera with a more radiation tolerant one for example with a suitable CMOS camera or apply both solutions simultaneously.