Large-Area MPPC with Enhanced VUV Sensitivity for Liquid Xenon Scintillation Detector

Abstract

A large-area Multi-Pixel Photon Counter (MPPC) sensitive to vacuum ultra violet (VUV) light has been developed for the liquid xenon (LXe) scintillation detector of the MEG II experiment. The LXe detector is designed to detect the 52.8\,MeV photon from the lepton flavour violating decay ${\mu }^{+}\to {\mathrm{e}}^{+}\gamma$ and is based on $900\ell$ LXe with a highly granular scintillation readout by 4092 VUV-MPPCs with an active area of $139{\mathrm{mm}}^2$ each, totalling $0.57{\mathrm{m}}^2$. The VUV-MPPC shows an excellent performance in LXe, which includes a high photon detection efficiency (PDE) up to 21\% for the LXe scintillation light in the VUV range, a high gain, a low probability of the optical cross-talk and the after-pulsing, a low dark count rate and a good single photoelectron resolution. The large active area of the VUV-MPPC is formed by connecting four independent small VUV-MPPC chips in series to avoid the increase of the sensor capacitance and thus, to have a short pulse-decay-time, which is crucial for high rate experiments. Performance tests of 4180 VUV-MPPCs produced for the LXe detector were also carried out at room temperature prior to the installation to the detector and all of them with only a few exceptions were found to work properly. The design and performance of the VUV-MPPC are described in detail as well as the results from the performance tests at room temperature.

arXiv commentRevised version accepted for publication in Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A, 10 pages, 19 figures

References in corpus (5)

• The design of the MEG II experiment
• VUV-sensitive Silicon Photomultipliers for Xenon Scintillation Light Detection in nEXO
• Characterization of Silicon Photomultipliers for nEXO
• Performance of VUV-sensitive MPPC for Liquid Argon Scintillation Light
• Mass production test of Hamamatsu MPPC for T2K neutrino oscillation experiment

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The Search for ${\mu }^{+}\to e^{+}\gamma$ with 10${}^{-14}$ Sensitivity: the Upgrade of the MEG Experiment
• Performance of novel VUV-sensitive Silicon Photo-Multipliers for nEXO
• Reflectance of Silicon Photomultipliers at Vacuum Ultraviolet Wavelengths
• High-sensitivity low-noise photodetector using large-area silicon photomultiplier
• Improving the Time Resolution of Large-Area LaBr3:Ce Detectors with SiPM Array Readout
• Study on degradation of VUV-sensitivity of MPPC for liquid xenon scintillation detector by radiation damage in MEG II experiment
• Front-end Electronics and Optimal Ganging Schemes for Single Photon Detection with Large Arrays of SiPMs in Liquid Argon
• Development of a high-light-yield liquid argon detector using tetraphenyl butadiene and silicon photomultiplier array
• Batch VUV4 Characterization for the SBC-LAr10 scintillating bubble chamber
• First principles studies of the surface and opto-electronic properties of ultra-thin t-Se