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Silicon Photomultipliers

  • Silicon Photomultipliers Activity

Involved researchers

Claudio Piemonte

The IRIS activity on Silicon Photomultipliers leads to the development of new SiPM technologies, aimed the the optimization of different detector parameters, such as the Dark Count Rate, the Breakdown Voltage uniformity, the Photo Detection Efficiency, the Excess Noise Factor and the Dynamic Range.

Optimization of the process goes through the redesign of the electric field in the active area of the microcells composing the SiPM, obtaining the RGB-SiPM technology, which features a reduced detector noise, expressed in terms of its Dark Count Rate (DCR), or the maximization of the PDE at different wavelengths, which lead to the introduction of a separate technology for the NUV light detection, called NUV-SiPM technology, and finally with the RGB-HD technology, obtaining a reduction of the microcell size, without Fill Factor loss, thanks to a re-design of the edge strucure of the microcells.

The availability of dedicated and specialized labs allows us to develop custom testing programs and procedures for the advanced characterization of the Silicon Photomultipliers in an automated way. Different procedures are used for the precise calculation of the Gain, of the Primary and Correlated noise, of the Photo Detection Efficiency (PDE), under pulsed and continuous illumination, and for the precise evaluation of the temperature dependence of the SiPM parameters. In addition, more complex and higher-level measurements can be performed, in example the timing performance with two detectors in coincidence for the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) application.

Application cases: 
Replacement of the traditional Photomultiplier Tube (PMT) in a number of applications, including high energy physics, nuclear medicine and scanning electron microscopy High-performance detectors for time-of-flight PET Ultra-high spatial resolution PET modules to be used for preclinical imaging and special PET applications for humans, such as cardiac and brain imaging
Objectives: 
  • the optimization of different detector parameters, such as the Dark Count Rate, the Breakdown Voltage uniformity, the Photo Detection Efficiency, the Excess Noise Factor and the Dynamic Range
  • minimization of the SiPM time jitter and correlated issues such as cross-talk and signal filtering, for use with ToF PET
  • exploit the intrinsic granularity of the SiPM structure to implement the position encoding through a light sharing approach
Research topics: 
Silicon Photomultipliers