Advancing Ultraviolet Detector Technology for future missions: Investigating the dark current plateau in silicon detectors using photon-counting EMCCDs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the noise characteristics of silicon-based ultraviolet detectors, focusing on the dark current plateau in photon-counting EMCCDs, to improve future UV space mission detector performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel test setup that isolates environmental effects on dark current in silicon detectors, advancing understanding of noise sources in UV detectors.

Findings

Identified potential sources of dark current plateau.

Developed a test setup to control environmental variables.

Presented preliminary results on noise characterization.

Abstract

Understanding the noise characteristics of high quantum efficiency silicon-based ultraviolet detectors, developed by the Microdevices Lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is critical for current and proposed UV missions using these devices. In this paper, we provide an overview of our detector noise characterization test bench that uses delta-doped, photon counting, Electron-multiplying CCDs (EMCCDs) to understand the fundamental noise properties relevant to all silicon CCDs and CMOS arrays. This work attempts to identify the source of the dark current plateau that has been previously measured with photon-counting EMCCDs and is known to be prevalent in other silicon-based arrays. It is suspected that the plateau could be due to a combination of detectable photons in the tail of blackbody radiation of the ambient instrument, low-level light leaks, and a non-temperature-dependent component that varies with substrate voltage. Our innovative test setup delineates the effect of the ambient environment during dark measurements by independently controlling the temperature of the detector and surrounding environment. We present the design of the test setup and preliminary results.