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Impact of Dark Counts in Low-Light Level Silicon Photonmultiplier Multi Readout Apllications PDF
Impact of Dark Counts in Low-Light Level Silicon Photonmultiplier Multi Readout Apllications PDF
N25-152
I.
INTRODUCTION
A. Setup
Photon-counting spectra of SiPM devices have been
obtained using the Hamamatsu S10362-11-100-U MPPC and
characterized in terms of their background noise. The dark
rates and their variation with temperature and bias voltage were
measured in a dark chamber specially built for this purpose, as
depicted in Fig. 1. An Ortec 710 power supply was used to bias
the SiPM between 69 and 70V. The SiPM output was initially
amplified with a linear amplifier (Canberra 2111) with no
shaping and fed into a peak sensing MCA. This was later
replaced by a custom amplifying circuit (Fig. 2) which was
developed and included inside the dark chamber, providing
similar results. To study the variation of the dark rate with
temperature, a cooling module was set up, consisting of a
thermoelectric Peltier module with a heat-sink and extracting
fan, controlled with a thermocouple.
Measurements were also taken with low light levels. A high
resolution pulse generator (BNC PB-5) was used to illuminate
a 470 nm LED and also to trigger the ADC gate for signal
acquisition from the SiPM. A BC-91A wavelength shifting
optical fiber was used between the LED and the SiPM. SiPMs
are known to be a good choice to detect light emitted from
scintillating fibers [4,5].
EXPERIMENTAL MEASUREMENTS
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B. Results
The following experimental results were obtained using the
initial amplifying scheme. The dark rates for different bias
voltage values were measured at room temperature and are
shown in Fig. 3, where it is clearly visible the dependence with
bias voltage and with detection threshold, as expected. The
photo-electron pulse-height spectrum for one of the test
conditions (Vb = 69.4V) is shown in Fig. 4. The single electron
peak is clearly visible (second peak from the left), and so are
the 2nd and even 3rd electron peaks, corresponding to multiple
simultaneous dark pulses within the device. Results of the dark
rate variation with temperature, for different threshold values,
are summarized in Fig. 5, where no light source was used. It is
seen that the dark rate (at a threshold of 0.5 p.e.) becomes
approximately half at every 9C.
The ADC spectrum of the time gated signal obtained with the
pulsed LED coupled to an optical fiber is shown in Fig. 6. The
high photo-electron resolution of the SiPM allows a clear
separation of several electron peaks. It can be seen that for very
low light levels, the single electron peak coincides with the
dark pulse shown above.
III.
SIMULATION
A. Method
The SiPM charge signal from primary photoelectrons
follows an approximate Poisson distribution. The charge
amplification process and other events such as small
differences between pixels or photon interactions in recharging
pixels, introduce Gaussian spreads in the signals collected [6].
Therefore, the expected SiPM charge spectrum is a Poisson
distribution convoluted with Gaussian distributions, as seen in
Fig. 4. A MATLAB application was developed to simulate
SiPM charge signals, for a given Poisson mean and Gaussian
standard deviation , ignoring counts below a given threshold
value. The values of and were taken from experimental
data, for different conditions of temperature, bias voltage and
charge integration time. The value of was found to vary
approximately between 0.2 and 0.75 and between 0.25 and
0.3. As shown in Fig. 7, the simulated spectrum shows a good
agreement with the acquired one, considering that the
simulation ignores the electronic noise.
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D. Results
SIMULATED CONDITIONS
Parameter
Simulated values
Number of events
5000
0.3, 0.5, 0.7
0.25
0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4
(10, 10)
10, 6, 2
20, 30, 40, 50%
Threshold
Position of the central fiber
Number of photons in the 5 fibers
Photo detection efficiency (PDE)
(1)
(2)
(3)
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I.F. Castro is grateful to the IEEE 2009 NSS-MIC General and
Scholarship Chairs for the Trainee Grant attributed.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
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