An introduction to the IAAT ultraviolet MCP detector development

Observations of ultraviolet light is the key to understand high temperature processes in the universe like hot plasma, accretion processes or illuminated protoplanetary discs around UV sources. Furthermore these observation contribute to major cosmological questions, like the distribution of baryonic matter or the formation of the milky way, as pointed out by Gomez de Castro et al.(1) Driven by the idea to participate in the Russian World Space Observatory we started to develop a position sensitive micro channel plate detector (MCP) for spectroscopy in the range of 160 nm to 300 nm. Although we are not part of this project we still build a MCP detector prototype. In this paper we will present the general design of the detector and mainly focus on the aspect of our photocathode, while the electronics will be explained in more detail in the paper "Characterisation of low power readout electronics for a UV microchannel plate detector with cross-strip readout" (Paper number 9144-116) by Marc Pfeifer.