[Triumf-seminars] TRIUMF Technical Seminar today at 11:00

[TRIUMF Seminars]

Date/Time: Fri 2012-07-27 at 11:00

Location:  Auditorium          

Speaker:   Virginia Spanoudaki and Ralf Schulze (Philips Technologie GmbH)

Title:     An overview of solid state Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) technology: From analog to fully digital photon counting

Abstract: Development of semiconductor-based single photon counting technologies is a rapidly
evolving field with a large variety of potential applications in high energy physics,
medical imaging, microscopy and safety. Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) offer a
promising alternative to traditional Photomultiplier Tubes (PMTs) by their high speed
and high gain light detection, compactness, insensitivity to magnetic fields, and large
scale cost-effectiveness.

In this seminar we will discuss the evolution of SiPM technology and will focus on their
advantages compared to other photodetectors, such as PMTs and proportional
Avalanche Photodiodes (APDs). A number of performance parameters will be reviewed
in detail with special interest in the SiPM energy-, time-, and position decoding
capabilities. Current challenges in the performance of SiPMs include high dark count
rates, crosstalk, temperature sensitivity, and the trade-off between dynamic range and
photon detection efficiency. We will address these challenges and provide an overview
of current design efforts to eliminate their effects. In addition we will discuss the future of
SiPM technology and provide examples of how this technology is currently started to be
exploited in medical imaging in particular, Positron Emission Tomography (PET).

The recent development of fully digital SiPMs (dSiPM) aims at solving some of the
problems of their analog counterparts by using the intrinsic digital characteristics of
Avalanche diodes operating in Geiger mode (SPADs). Instead of the delayed
digitization of an intermediate analog pulse, dSiPMs record the presence or absence of
a photon by direct digital summation of discharged SiPM cells, thus eliminating the need
for any intermediate digitization steps. There are multiple benefits of this direct
digitization approach, such as full scalability and the absence of difficult to tune and
expensive ASICs. We will explain the acquisition process in a dSiPM and show some of
the possibilities that this new approach opens. An overview of results from test- and
demonstration measurements in PET and High Energy Physics (HEP) will be given,
demonstrating the scalability of the dSiPM technology while maintaining intrinsic
performance parameters.



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