Characterization of Silicon Photomultipliers after proton irradiation up to $10^{12} n_{eq}/mm^2$

TL;DR

This study evaluates the effects of high-fluence proton irradiation on various silicon photomultipliers, revealing increased noise but stable gain and efficiency, and introduces new methods for performance assessment and defect localization.

Contribution

The paper provides detailed characterization of SiPM performance post-irradiation up to $10^{12} n_{eq}/mm^2$, including novel methodologies for breakdown voltage estimation and defect localization.

Findings

Dark count rate significantly increases with irradiation dose.

Gain and photon detection efficiency remain stable after irradiation.

New techniques for high-noise performance characterization and defect localization are introduced.

Abstract

Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are highly-sensitive photodetectors emerging as the technology of choice for many applications, including large high-energy physics experiments where they often are exposed to high radiation fluences. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in assessing the performance deterioration of such detectors after the irradiation with proton or neutron, with different fluence levels. In this work, samples of different FBK SiPM technologies, made with different manufacturing technologies, were irradiated at the INFN-LNS facility (Italy) with protons reaching fluences up to $10^{12}n_{eq}/mm^2$ (1 MeV neutron equivalent) which correspond $10^{14}n_{eq}/cm^2$ to and their performances were characterized in detail after an approximately 30 days room temperature annealing. The results show a significant worsening of the primary noise (dark count rate) of the detectors, which increases with the irradiation dose, whereas the other performance parameters like the micro-cell gain, the correlated noise probability and the photon detection efficiency do not show significant variations over the investigated dose range. The breakdown voltage estimation after irradiation is another important aspect for a SiPM. In this contribution, we show several methods for its estimation and compare the results. We also introduced new methodologies to characterize the performance of the SiPMs when they present a very high level of noise. Lastly, we also analyzed the spatial localization of the proton-induced defects inside the device, i.e. the defects that mostly contribute to the increase of the DCR of the device, through the emission microscopy (EMMI) technique. In particular, we analyzed the SiPMs at the single cell level, trying to identify and spatially localize the defects.