Ultra-high cell-density silicon photomultipliers with high detection efficiency

Abstract

Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are arrays of many single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs), all connected in parallel. Each SPAD is sensitive to single photons and the SiPM gives an output proportional to the number of detected photons. These sensors are becoming more and more popular in different applications, from high-energy physics to spectroscopy, and they have been significantly improved over last years, decreasing the noise, increasing the cell fill-factor (FF) and thus achieving very high photon-detection efficiency (PDE). In FBK (Trento, Italy), we developed new SiPM technologies with high-density (HD) and, more recently, ultra-high-density (UHD) of cells (i.e. density of SPADs). These technologies employ deep-trenches between cells, for electrical and optical isolation. As an extreme case the smallest-cell, SiPM, i.e. with 5μm cell pitch, has about 40000 SPADs per squared millimeter. Such small SPAD dimensions gives a significantly high dynamic range to the SiPM. These small-cells SiPM have a lower correlated noise (including lower afterpulsing probability) and a faster recharge time (in the order of few nanoseconds), and they also preserve a very good detection efficiency (despite the small SPAD dimension).