Characterization of Spurious Charge in SENSEI Skipper-CCDs
Abstract
Skipper Charge-Coupled Devices (Skipper-CCDs) are a leading technology in the search for sub-GeV dark matter and coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. A key background for rare-event searches with these detectors arises from "spurious charge" -- single-electron events generated when charges are transferred through the active region to the serial register, and across the serial register to the readout stage. We present a characterization of spurious charge in both the active region and the serial register of SENSEI Skipper-CCDs, and show that, in a well-shielded low-background environment, the dominant contribution originates in the serial register during Skipper readout, when horizontal clocks are held at constant voltage between pixel transfers. Motivated by this finding, we develop a "tri-level" clocking scheme in which the held-low phase is raised to an intermediate voltage during readout to suppress trap-mediated charge generation. Using the SENSEI detector near the MINOS cavern, we measure a serial-register single-electron density of electrons/pixel/image under standard SENSEI readout conditions, reduced to electrons/pixel/image with tri-level clocking -- a factor of 7 improvement. This technique offers a promising path to lower backgrounds in current and future Skipper-CCD experiments.
Comments: 10 pages + references, 9 figures
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.30281,
title = {Characterization of Spurious Charge in SENSEI Skipper-CCDs},
author = {Yikai Wu and Ansh Desai and Sho Uemura and Ana M. Botti and Brenda A. Cervantes-Vergara and Fernando Chierchie and Alex Drlica-Wagner and Rouven Essig and Juan Estrada and Erez Etzion and Guillermo Fernandez Moroni and Miqueas Gamero and Stephen E. Holland and Ian Lawson and Steffon Luoma and Nathan A. Saffold and Miguel Sofo-Haro and Javier Tiffenberg and Tomer Volansky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30281},
year = {2026}
}