Testing radiation tolerance of optical transceivers for the SuperB experiment

SuperB is a novel, high-luminosity (10³⁶ cm^-2s^-1), asymmetric e+e- collider to be built at the future Cabibbo Laboratory, in the campus of the University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy). A detector aimed at studying the B physics will be installed in this facility. High-speed serial links will be used for trigger, control and data read-out. The on-detector ends of the links will have to withstand a hadron fluence of 8 · 10¹⁰ cm^-2 per effective year (10⁷ s). In this work, we present results of irradiation tests on off-the-shelf optical transceivers, candidate for deployment in SuperB. We irradiated the components with a 62-MeV proton beam at INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (Catania, Italy). By means of our setup, we recorded parameters such as BER, drawn current and optical power, for the laser and for the photodiode, as a function of the absorbed dose. We discuss our results in the view of the deployment of the considered components in the SuperB experimental apparatus.