Characterization and On-Field Performance of the MuTe Silicon Photomultipliers

Abstract

The Muon Telescope, MuTe, is an instrument for imaging volcanoes in Colombia. It consists of a scintillator tracking system and a water Cherenkov detector for particle energy measurement. The Muon Telescope operates autonomously in high-altitude environments where the temperature gradient reaches up to 10 °C. In this work, we characterize the telescope silicon photomultipliers’ breakdown voltage, gain, and noise for temperature variations spanning 0 to 40 °C. We demonstrate that the discrimination threshold for the Muon Telescope hodoscope must be above 5 photo-electrons to avoid contamination due to dark count, crosstalk, and afterpulsing. We also assess the detector counting rate depending on day-night temperature variations.