International Conference on the Advancement of Silicon Photomultipliers

SiPM lost its performance characteristics when exposed to high dose of neutrons. However, the distinct hallmark of SiPMs, low dark count and excellent photon-number-resolving capability, can be recovered by thermal annealing. Several Hamamatsu and FBK series SiPMs are characterized before and after exposure of up to 1010 neutron/cm2 dosage using a 14 MeV neutron generation source. Collectively, we established that the typical orders of magnitude increase in dark current upon neutron irradiation can be lowered substantially after processing them with a novel thermal annealing procedure, and single-photon detection are to some extent recovered. Moreover, we found no significant difference on neutron damaged behavior when SiPMs are irradiated at room or liquid nitrogen temperatures.