Quality Assurance Test of Silicon Photomultipliers and Electronic Boards for STAR Event Plane Detector

TL;DR

This paper details the quality assurance testing procedures for silicon photomultiplier arrays and electronic boards used in the STAR event plane detector, ensuring system reliability for heavy-ion collision measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive QA method and test system for silicon photomultiplier arrays and electronic boards in a large-scale detector system.

Findings

Successful identification of issues before deployment

High reliability of mass-produced QA-tested boards

Enhanced detector performance assurance

Abstract

The event plane detector (EPD), installed in the Solenoid Tracker at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory is a plastic scintillator-based device that measures the reaction centrality and event plane in the forward region of the relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We used silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) arrays to detect the photons produced in the scintillator via the fiber connection. Signals from the SiPM arrays were amplified by the front-end electronic (FEE) board, and sent to the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) boards for further processing via the receiver(RX) board. The full EPD system consisted of 24 super-sectors (SSs); each SS was equipped with two SiPM boards, two FEE boards and two RX boards, and they corresponded to 744 readout channels. All these boards were mass produced at the University of Science and Technology of China, with a dedicated quality assurance (QA) procedures applied to identify any problems before deployment. This article describes the details of the QA method and the related test system. The QA test results are presented along with the discussions.