Characterization and performance of hyper Suprime-Cam CCD

Abstract

Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) is a second-generation wide field imaging camera for Subaru telescope with 10 times wider field of view (FOV) compared with Suprime-Cam (SC) currently being used. HSC makes the survey speed considerably faster than SC, while maintaining the high image quality of SC. The 1.5 degrees in diameter FOV is covered with 116 of 2K × 4K fully depleted back-illuminated CCDs with 15 μm pixels developed by HAMAMATSU Photonics K. K. and National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The CCDs for HSC are designed to have higher quantum efficiency than those for SC in a wider range in the visible wavelengths, especially in the blue region. We at NAOJ have started acceptance inspection of the CCDs being delivered from HAMAMATSU. We used the X-ray source of 55Fe and the LED to measure charge transfer efficiency, readout noise, linearity, and full-well capacity of 33 CCDs. In addition, we measured the quantum efficiency of 7 CCDs. We confirmed all the CCDs have good performances and quality. In this paper, we report the results from the acceptance inspection and characterization of these CCDs.