Single-electron and single-photon sensitivity with a silicon Skipper CCD
Instrumentation and Detectors2017-10-04v1Cosmology and Nongalactic AstrophysicsEarth and Planetary AstrophysicsInstrumentation and Methods for AstrophysicsHigh Energy Physics - Experiment
We have developed a non-destructive readout system that uses a floating-gate amplifier on a thick, fully depleted charge coupled device (CCD) to achieve ultra-low readout noise of 0.068 e- rms/pix. This is the first time that discrete sub-electron readout noise has been achieved reproducibly over millions of pixels on a stable, large-area detector. This allows the precise counting of the number of electrons in each pixel, ranging from pixels with 0 electrons to more than 1500 electrons. The resulting CCD detector is thus an ultra-sensitive calorimeter. It is also capable of counting single photons in the optical and near-infrared regime. Implementing this innovative non-destructive readout system has a negligible impact on CCD design and fabrication, and there are nearly immediate scientific applications. As a particle detector, this CCD will have unprecedented sensitivity to low-mass dark matter particles and coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering, while astronomical applications include future direct imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets.
@article{arxiv.1706.00028,
title = {Single-electron and single-photon sensitivity with a silicon Skipper CCD},
author = {Javier Tiffenberg and Miguel Sofo-Haro and Alex Drlica-Wagner and Rouven Essig and Yann Guardincerri and Steve Holland and Tomer Volansky and Tien-Tien Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.00028},
year = {2017}
}