Large area tiles of position-sensitive Silicon photomultipliers

Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are highly sensitive photodetectors emerging as the technology of choice for many applications. In FBK, we developed a position sensitive SiPM technology, called “linearly graded” (LG-SiPM), which is based on an avalanche-current position-weighted partitioning approach. In particular, we recently developed a new version of LG-SiPM with a larger chip area (10x10 mm2) and based on NUV-HD technology, having a peak photon detection efficiency at 420 nm. These SiPMs have been characterized in terms of noise, detection efficiency and position resolution. We also developed tiles of 2x2 and 3x3 elements with such SiPMs, reaching very large sensitive areas of about 20×20 mm2 and 30×30 mm2. In such large area tiles we implemented a “smart channel” configuration, being able to have just 6 output channels and 8 channels respectively, with a position resolution below 0.5 mm. These detectors provide great advantages in all application requiring position resolution but with a small number of readout channels and reduced system complexity.