27 November 2020 On-sky silicon photomultiplier detector performance measurements for millisecond to sub-microsecond optical source variability studies
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Abstract

In our Ultra-Fast Astronomy (UFA) program, we aim to improve measurements of variability of astronomical targets on millisecond and shorter time scales. In this work, we present initial on-sky measurements of the performance of silicon photomultiplier detectors (SiPMs) for UFA. We mounted two different SiPMs at the focal plane of the 0.7-m aperture Nazarbayev University Transient Telescope at the Assy-Turgen Astrophysical Observatory, with no filter in front of the detector. The 3  mm  ×  3  mm SiPM single-channel detectors have a field of view of 2.2716  ′    ×  2.2716  ′  . During the nights of October 28–29, 2019, we measured sky background, bright stars, and an artificial source with a 100-Hz flashing frequency. We compared detected SiPM counts with Gaia satellite G-band flux values to show that our SiPMs have a linear response. With our two SiPMs (models S14520-3050VS and S14160-3050HS), we measured a dark current of ∼130 and ∼85 kilo counts per second (kcps), and a sky background of ∼201 and ∼203  kcps, respectively. We measured an intrinsic crosstalk of 10.34% and 10.52% and derived a 5σ sensitivity of 13.9 and 14 Gaia G-band magnitude for 200-ms exposures, for the two detectors, respectively. For a 10-μs window, and allowing a false alarm rate of once per 100 nights, we derived a sensitivity of 22 detected photons, or six Gaia G-band magnitudes. For nanosecond timescales, our detection is limited by crosstalk to 12 detected photons, which corresponds to a fluence of ∼155 photons per square meter.

© 2020 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 2329-4124/2020/$28.00 © 2020 SPIE
Albert W. K. Lau, Mehdi Shafiee, George F. Smoot, Bruce Grossan, Siyang Li, and Zhanat Maksut "On-sky silicon photomultiplier detector performance measurements for millisecond to sub-microsecond optical source variability studies," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 6(4), 046002 (27 November 2020). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.6.4.046002
Received: 18 May 2020; Accepted: 6 November 2020; Published: 27 November 2020
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Cited by 5 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Sensors

Photons

Stars

Silicon photomultipliers

Sensor performance

Calibration

Telescopes

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