Low-Gain Avalanche Diodes are a type of silicon Avalanche Photo-Diodes originally developed for the fast detection of minimum ionizing particles in high-energy physics experiments. Thanks to their fast timing performance, the Low-Gain Avalanche Diode paradigm enables detectors to accurately measure minimum ionizing particles with a timing resolution of a few tens of picoseconds. Such a performance is due to a thin substrate and the presence of a moderate signal gain. This internal gain of a few tens is enough to compensate for the reduced charge deposition in the thinner substrate and the noise of fast read-out systems. While Low-Gain Avalanche Diodes are optimized for the detection of minimum ionizing particles for high-energy particle detectors, it is critical to study their performance for the detection of different types of particle, such as X-rays, gamma-rays, or alphas. In this paper, we evaluate the gain of three types of Low-Gain Avalanche Diodes: two devices with different geometries and doping profiles fabricated by Brookhaven National Laboratory, and one fabricated by Hamamatsu Photonics with a different process. Since the gain in LGADs depends on the bias voltage applied to the sensor, pulse-height spectra have been acquired for bias voltages spanning from the depletion voltage up to breakdown voltage. The signal-to-noise ratio of the generated signals and the shape of their spectra allow us to probe the underlying physics of the multiplication process.
@article{arxiv.2402.04132,
title = {Spectroscopic performance of Low-Gain Avalanche Diodes for different types of radiation},
author = {Gabriele Giacomini and Wei Chen and Gabriele D'Amen and Enrico Rossi and Alessandro Tricoli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.04132},
year = {2024}
}