ON-SKY SILICON PHOTOMULTIPLIER DETECTOR PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENTS FOR MILLISECOND TO SUB-MICROSECOND OPTICAL SOURCE VARIABILITY STUDIES
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Date
2020
Authors
Lau, Albert Wai Kit
Shafiee, Mehdi
Smoot, George F.
Grossan, Bruce
Li, Siyang
Maksut, Zhanat
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
arxiv
Abstract
In our Ultra-Fast Astronomy (UFA) program, we aim to improve measurements of variability of astro nomical 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-meter aperture Nazarbayev University Transient Telescope at the Assy-Turgen Astrophysical Observatory
(NUTTelA-TAO), with no filter in front of the detector. The 3mm × 3mm SiPM single-channel detectors have a
field of view of 2.27160 × 2.27160
. During the nights of 2019 October 28-29, we measured sky background, bright
stars, and an artificial source with a 100Hz 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 14.0 Gaia G-band magnitude for 200ms 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
6 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
Description
Keywords
Type of access: Open Access, Ultra Fast Astronomy, Silicon photomultiplier, Millisecond optical variability
Citation
Lau, A. W. K., Shafiee, M., Smoot, G. F., Grossan, B., Li, S., & Maksut, Z. (2020). On-sky silicon photomultiplier detector performance measurements for millisecond to sub-microsecond optical source variability studies. Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, 6(04). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.jatis.6.4.046002