ON-SKY SILICON PHOTOMULTIPLIER DETECTOR PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENTS FOR MILLISECOND TO SUB-MICROSECOND OPTICAL SOURCE VARIABILITY STUDIES
| dc.contributor.author | Lau, Albert Wai Kit | |
| dc.contributor.author | Shafiee, Mehdi | |
| dc.contributor.author | Smoot, George F. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Grossan, Bruce | |
| dc.contributor.author | Li, Siyang | |
| dc.contributor.author | Maksut, Zhanat | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-07-11T04:26:12Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-07-11T04:26:12Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020 | |
| dc.description.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 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.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 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://nur.nu.edu.kz/handle/123456789/6391 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | arxiv | en_US |
| dc.rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States | * |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ | * |
| dc.subject | Type of access: Open Access | en_US |
| dc.subject | Ultra Fast Astronomy | en_US |
| dc.subject | Silicon photomultiplier | en_US |
| dc.subject | Millisecond optical variability | en_US |
| dc.title | ON-SKY SILICON PHOTOMULTIPLIER DETECTOR PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENTS FOR MILLISECOND TO SUB-MICROSECOND OPTICAL SOURCE VARIABILITY STUDIES | en_US |
| dc.type | Article | en_US |
| workflow.import.source | science |