Characterization of a large area silicon photomultiplier

Abstract This work illustrates and compares some methods to measure the most relevant parameters of silicon photo-multipliers (SiPMs), such as photon detection efficiency as a function of over-voltage and wavelength, dark count rate, optical cross-talk, afterpulse probability. For the measurement of the breakdown voltage, V B D , several methods using the current–voltage I V curve are compared, such as the “IV Model”, the “relative logarithmic derivative”, the “inverse logarithmic derivative”, the “second logarithmic derivative”, and the “third derivative” models. We also show how some of these characteristics can be quite well described by few parameters and allow, for example, to build a function of the wavelength and over-voltage describing the photodetection efficiency. This is fundamental to determine the working point of SiPMs in applications where external factors can affect it. These methods are applied to the large area monolithic hexagonal SiPM S10943-2832(X), developed in collaboration with Hamamatsu and adopted for a camera for a gamma-ray telescope, called the SST-1M. We describe the measurements of the performance at room temperature of this device. The methods used here can be applied to any other device and the physics background discussed here are quite general and valid for a large phase-space of the parameters.