Evaluation of the KLauS ASIC at low temperature

TL;DR

This study evaluates the performance of the KLauS5 ASIC at low temperatures for use in the TAO neutrino detector, showing it maintains good charge measurement capabilities despite some parameter degradations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of KLauS5 ASIC performance from room temperature to -50°C, demonstrating its suitability for cryogenic neutrino detection applications.

Findings

KLauS5 maintains good charge noise and linearity at low temperatures.

Key parameters like dynamic range and power consumption degrade in cold conditions.

Single photoelectron resolution remains high with gains over 1.5×10^6.

Abstract

The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO) is proposed to first use a cold liquid scintillator detector (-50~$^\circ$C) equipped with large-area silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) ($\sim$10~m$^2$) to precisely measure the reactor antineutrino spectrum with a record energy resolution of < 2\% at 1 MeV. The KLauS ASIC shows excellent performance at room temperature and is a potential readout solution for TAO. In this work, we report evaluations of the fifth version of the KLauS ASIC (KLauS5) from room temperature to -50~$^\circ$C with inputs of injected charge or SiPMs. Our results show that KLauS5 has good performance at the tested temperatures with no significant degradation of the charge noise, charge linearity, gain uniformity or recovery time. Meanwhile, we also observe that several key parameters degrade when the chip operates in cold conditions, including the dynamic range and power consumption. However, even with this degradation, a good signal-to-noise ratio and good resolution of a single photoelectron can still be achieved for the tested SiPM with a gain of greater than 1.5$\times$10$^6$ and even an area of SiPM up to 1~cm$^2$ in one channel, corresponding to an input capacitance of approximately 5~nF. Thus, we conclude that KLauS5 can fulfill the TAO requirements for precise charge measurement.