Design and realization of a facility for the characterization of Silicon Avalanche PhotoDiodes

TL;DR

This paper details the design and implementation of an automated facility capable of simultaneously characterizing up to 24 Silicon Avalanche Photodiodes across a range of temperatures, providing key performance metrics with high precision.

Contribution

It introduces a novel automated system for rapid, simultaneous characterization of multiple Silicon Avalanche Photodiodes, including detailed procedures and performance evaluation.

Findings

Measured gain and dark current characteristics of 380 APDs

Achieved systematic uncertainties of about 1%

Demonstrated the facility's capability with CLAS12-Forward Tagger APDs

Abstract

We present the design, construction, and performance of a facility for the characterization of Silicon Avalanche Photodiodes in the operating temperature range between -2 $^\circ$C and 25 $^\circ$C. The system can simultaneously measure up to 24 photo-detectors, in a completely automatic way, within one day of operations. The measured data for each sensor are: the internal gain as a function of the bias voltage and temperature, the gain variation with respect to the bias voltage, and the dark current as a function of the gain. The systematic uncertainties have been evaluated during the commissioning of the system to be of the order of 1%. This paper describes in detail the facility design and layout, and the procedure employed to characterize the sensors. The results obtained from the measurement of the 380 Avalanche Photodiodes of the CLAS12-Forward Tagger calorimeter detector are then reported, as the first example of the massive usage of the facility.