Time jitter of silicon photomultipliers

Time jitter, it means timing distribution of a detector response to single photons is one of the key parameters describing the timing resolution capabilities of any photodetector. In this work, the time jitter measurements of silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) with active area from 1 to 36 mm2 are presented. These measurements were made using fast picosecond laser PicoQuant LDH P C-405 with wavelength of 405 nm and pulse width below 70 ps. The measurements were done with Hamamatsu Multi-Pixel Photon Counters (MPPCs) with micropixel size of 50 μm (050C). Additional data were also recorded when only a part of an active area of the tested MPPCs was illuminated. The MPPC output was fed into fast amplifier MiniCircuits ERA-4SM+ with 4GHz bandwidth and then further amplified by NIM modules and processed by constant fraction discriminator. In each experiment the noise component was measured and subtracted from the raw timing data. The aim of the study was to understand the influence of the SiPM´s capacitance and rise time on the time jitter and also to distinguish differences resulting from the electronics optimization from those due to physical effects connected with an active or illuminated area of a detector.