Silicon photomultiplier timing performance study

TL;DR

This study investigates how temperature and bias voltage influence the timing resolution of Hamamatsu's MPPCs, revealing optimal conditions for improved performance especially with low photon counts.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the combined effects of temperature and bias voltage on MPPC timing resolution across different photon detection scenarios.

Findings

Timing resolution improves at lower temperatures and higher over-voltages.

Significant improvements (up to 5x) are observed with low photon counts.

Temperature effects diminish with increasing number of fired pixels.

Abstract

Many characteristics of Silicon Photomultipliers can be tuned with temperature and operation voltage. We present preliminary results of a study of the effect of these two operation parameters on the time resolution of large active area Multi-Pixel Photon Counters (MPPCs) manufactured by Hamamatsu. Measurements at -10 C, 0 C, and 10 C at different bias voltages were performed. The time resolution is best at low temperature and high over-voltage. Most significant improvements can be achieved in cases with low number of fired pixels (<10 pixels). Between the worst and best case among the considered conditions a factor of 5 improvement was observed. In cases with large number of fired pixels (>40 pixels) the effect of temperature and operation voltage becomes smaller. The timing performance still improves with decreasing temperature (~ factor of 2) but it hardly depends on the operation voltage. The study shows, that especially in applications where only few photons are available for detection a careful optimization of temperature and operation voltage are advisable to obtain optimum timing results with the MPPC.