Tiled silicon photomultipliers for large-area low-light sensing applications

Abstract

Large area optical detection systems are required for applications including cell imaging, spectroscopy, nuclear medicine, bio diagnostics, radiation detection and high energy physics. Each of these applications requires that a detector or detector arrays be closely coupled with light sources or optical couplers such as fibres or light couplers. In this paper, the scaling of novel Silicon Photomultiplier detectors to tile across a large area is presented. In particular, a novel method is discussed for compact packaging of SPM detectors into a tiled 2D detector array for large area imaging and 2D spatial detection. The SPM detector has performance characteristics comparable to vacuum photon multiplier tubes used in these applications today but offers several performance and system design advantages including spatial resolution, optical over exposure, small form factor, weight, magnetic insensitivity and low bias operation.