Silicon photomultiplier timing performance study

Many characteristics of Silicon Photomultipliers can be tuned with temperature and operation voltage. We present preliminary results of a study of the effect of these two operation parameters on the time resolution of large active area Multi-Pixel Photon Counters (MPPCs) manufactured by Hamamatsu. Measurements at −10, 0, and 10 °C at different bias voltages were performed. The time resolution is best at low temperature and high over-voltage. Most significant improvements can be achieved in cases with low number of fired pixels ( < 10 pixels ) . Between the worst and best case among the considered conditions a factor of five improvement was observed. In cases with large number of fired pixels ( > 40 pixels ) the effect of temperature and operation voltage becomes smaller. The timing performance still improves with decreasing temperature ( ≈ factor of 2) but it hardly depends on the operation voltage. The study shows that especially in applications where only few photons are available for detection a careful optimization of temperature and operation voltage are advisable to obtain optimum timing results with the MPPC.