The cross-talk problem in SiPMs and their use as light sensors for imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes

One of the major drawbacks of a SiPM is due to the so-called cross-talk effect. Often, one single photon in a chain reaction can generate more photons and thus can fire more than one micro-cell of a SiPM. This can be considered as a noise in the signal multiplication process and this degrades the signal/noise ratio. In self-trigger schemes this noise can be so high that it can make operating them difficult at low threshold settings. For the past few years, we have dwelt on this effect aiming to suppress it at the design stage. One can use (a) trenches around the micro-cells for suppressing the direct photon “communication” channel and (b) the so-called double p–n junction for suppressing photon-induced charge “communication” in neighbor pixels. The low cross-talk is mandatory, for example, for producing SiPM-based light sensor modules for the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Technique projects for ground-based gamma-ray astrophysics. We produced and tested a few modules consisting of 4 SiPMs, each with a size of 5 mm×5 mm of custom production type. We report here on the main parameters of these units.