Speaker
Description
Thorough calibration of silicon detectors and their front-end electronics is a time-consuming and high-cost activity. Not only several particle beams including electron, proton, and heavy ions are needed, but also, depending on the design, other property effects such as temperature, bias voltage, and gain to name a few, might need to be characterized. This is especially true for the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) RADiation hard Electron Monitor (RADEM). RADEM detectors’ signal are processed by three, highly customable IDE3466 VATA IDEAS ASICs. In this work, we used Single Photon Absorption laser with different energies and frequencies to study the energy, gain, and temperature, dependence of the detectors’ response. We also performed heavy ion beam testing at RADEF.
These tests showed that the RADEM Low Gain channels respond linearly to energies from at least 5pJ (~21 MeV) to 150 pJ (~536 MeV), at rates up to 500.000 particles per second, indicating a behaviour consistent with the RADEM requirements. While the heavy ion calibration tests showed lower coefficients than the theorical values, this was attributed to cable loss.
The tests also showed that the ASIC gain can be adjusted from 50% to 150% with a 3rd order polynomial dependence. No changes were found by varying the coincidence window except at its lowest possible value. In that condition, the coincidence time is so large that can hinder particle detection at rates above ~5000 particles per second. The tests also showed that the detector response follows a Boltzmann distribution with temperature.
Overall, laser testing allowed to perform cost-efficient extensive characterization of the RADEM.
