Characterization of New Silicon Photomultipliers with Low Dark Noise at Low Temperature

Abstract: Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) have a low radioactivity, compact geometry, low operation voltage, and reasonable photo-detection efficiency for vacuum ultraviolet light (VUV). Therefore it has the potential to replace photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) for future dark matter experiments with liquid xenon (LXe). However, SiPMs have nearly two orders of magnitude higher dark count rate (DCR) compared to that of PMTs at the LXe temperature ($\sim$ 165 K). This type of high DCR mainly originates from the carriers that are generated by band-to-band tunneling effect. To suppress the tunneling effect, we have developed a new SiPM with lowered electric field strength in cooperation with Hamamatsu Photonics K. K. and characterized its performance in a temperature range of 153 K to 298 K. We demonstrated that the newly developed SiPMs had 6--54 times lower DCR at low temperatures compared to that of the conventional SiPMs.