SENSE financially supports the LIGHT-17 workshop at Ringberg Castle, Bavaria, Germany taking place from 16 – 20 October 2017.
LIGHT-17 is the 9th in a series of workshops on Photosensor Developments for High Energy and Astro-Particle Physics. Leading specialists from High Energy and Astro-Particle physics and selected industrial partners are invited to this workshop, discussing the very frontier developments on low-light-level (LLL) fast photon sensors and the future trends.
One session of this workshop will be devoted to SENSE. There the roadmap towards the ultimate Low Light-Level Sensor developed by the SENSE Consortium and the Expert Group will be presented.
As written on the LIGHT-17 website the main focus of the current workshop shall be the latest developments and trends in vacuum photo multiplier tubes (PMTs), especially accentuating the photo cathode quantum efficiency as well as silicon-based matrixes of avalanche photo-diodes with common anode, operated in Geiger mode and their variations (SiPM). In recent years the PMTs with bialkali photo cathode were significantly improved, showing peak quantum efficiency (QE) values of up to 42-43 % on average. Also a serious effort was made towards improving the Collection efficiency of photo-electrons onto the PMT 1st dynode to the level of 95-98 % as well as in reducing the after-pulsing down to 0.01 % level (≥ 4 photo electrons).
The developments on novel SiPMs are continuously progressing. New commercial products, applying advanced novel solutions, become available. Together with improvement of the main parameters of SiPM one can observe interesting trends offering higher level of flexibility for integrating matrixes and for providing elements for controlling and reading out the signals.
In many low light level (LLL) applications and in a number of High Energy and Astro-Particle Physics experiments solutions are underway for using SiPMs instead of PMTs. An interesting question is to explore the limiting factors towards the largest size SiPM-based (also composite) pixels in detector and imaging applications. Also in medical instrumentation SiPM can offer valuable advantages, as for example, the unmatched neither by the APDs nor by the PMTs time and amplitude resolutions.