Characterisation of Silicon Photomultipliers for Liquid Xenon Detectors

Abstract

Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) are considered as a solid-state sensor alternative to photomultiplier tubes in experiments using liquid xenon (LXe) as a radiation detection medium. The main requirements are single-photon detection of the vacuum ultraviolet scintillation light from LXe at 178nm with high resolution and detection efficiency and low noise rates. Further requirements for dark matter and double beta decay searches are ultra-low radioactivity levels of all the components including the substrates and cold electronics. Here we describe our characterisation of Hamamatsu 6$\times$6mm${}^2$ SiPMs in the temperature range 110-300K in nitrogen gas, as well as long-term measurements in cold nitrogen gas at 172K and liquid xenon at 185K. After we introduce the experimental setups, the data acquisition schemes and analysis methods, we show the single-photon response, the gain versus bias voltage, as well as the dark and correlated noise rates. We demonstrate the long-term stability at cryogenic temperatures, and conclude that SiPM arrays are promising candidates for photosensor arrays in liquid xenon detectors. Furthermore, we study the radioactivity of the raw SiPM materials with gamma spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and conclude that SiPMs are suitable for use in low-background experiments.

References in corpus (13)

• DarkSide-20k: A 20 Tonne Two-Phase LAr TPC for Direct Dark Matter Detection at LNGS
• DARWIN: towards the ultimate dark matter detector
• The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment
• The XENON1T Dark Matter Experiment
• Sensitivity and discovery potential of the proposed nEXO experiment to neutrinoless double beta decay
• XMASS detector
• Lowering the radioactivity of the photomultiplier tubes for the XENON1T dark matter experiment
• Calibration of a Liquid Xenon Detector with Kr-83m
• Spatially uniform calibration of a liquid xenon detector at low energies using 83m-Kr
• Material radioassay and selection for the XENON1T dark matter experiment
• Gator: a low-background counting facility at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory
• Qualification Tests of the R11410-21 Photomultiplier Tubes for the XENON1T Detector
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Cited by in corpus (25)

• Characterization of the Hamamatsu VUV4 MPPCs for nEXO
• Neutral Bremsstrahlung emission in xenon unveiled
• Performance of novel VUV-sensitive Silicon Photo-Multipliers for nEXO
• Performance of Hamamatsu VUV4 SiPMs for detecting liquid argon scintillation
• The first dual-phase xenon TPC equipped with silicon photomultipliers and characterisation with ${}^{37}$Ar
• Reflectivity and PDE of VUV4 Hamamatsu SiPMs in Liquid Xenon
• Scintillation characteristics of a NaI(Tl) crystal at low-temperature with silicon photomultiplier
• Recent Advances in Bubble-Assisted Liquid Hole Multipliers in Liquid Xenon
• Sensitivities for coherent elastic scattering of solar and supernova neutrinos with future NaI(Tl) dark matter search detectors of COSINE-200/1T
• Design and construction of Xenoscope -- a full-scale vertical demonstrator for the DARWIN observatory
• First Imaging Results of a Bubble-assisted Liquid Hole Multiplier with SiPM readout in Liquid Xenon
• GPU-based optical simulation of the DARWIN detector
• SiPM array of Xenoscope, a full-scale DARWIN vertical demonstrator
• Operation and performance of a dual-phase crystalline/vapor xenon time projection chamber
• Scintillation detectors with silicon photomultiplier readout in a dilution refrigerator at temperatures down to 0.2 K
• Cryogenic SiPMs for the Optical Readout of DarkSide-20k
• Why would you put a flashlight in a dark matter detector?
• A large facility for photosensors test at cryogenic temperature
• A Novel Low-Background Photomultiplier Tube Developed for Xenon Based Detectors
• Sensitivity of the DARWIN observatory to the neutrinoless double beta decay of ${}^{136}$Xe
• Design Challenges for a Future Liquid Xenon Observatory
• Demonstrating a broadband Photon Detection Efficiency model on VUV sensitive Silicon Photomultipliers
• Characterization and on-field performance of the MuTe Silicon Photomultipliers
• A measurement of the mean electronic excitation energy of liquid xenon
• Characterisation of SiPM Photon Emission in the Dark