A readout circuit dedicated for the detection of chemiluminescence using a silicon photomultiplier

Abstract

A: A readout circuit dedicated for the detection of the chemiluminescence phenomenon using a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) is presented. During chemiluminescence, light is generated as a result of chemical reaction. Chemiluminescence is used in many applications within medicine, chemistry, biology and biotechnology, and is one of the most important sensing techniques in biomedical science and clinical medicine. The front-end electronics consist of a preamplifier and a fast shaper -this produces pulses, the peaking time which is 3.6 ns for a single photon and the FWHM is 3.8 ns. The system has been optimised to measure chemiluminescence -it is sensitive at the level of single photons, it generates a low number of overlapping pulses and is accurate. Two methods of signal detection are analysed and compared: the counting of events and amplitude detection. The relationship between the chemiluminescence light intensity and the concentration of the chemical compound (luminol) is linear in the range of the tested concentrations and has strong linearity parameters and low prediction intervals. K: Analogue electronic circuits; Front-end electronics for detector readout; Optical detector readout concepts; Photon detectors for UV, visible and IR photons (solid-state) (PIN diodes, APDs, Si-PMTs, G-APDs, CCDs, EBCCDs, EMCCDs etc) 1Corresponding author.

A handheld luminometer with sub-attomole limit of detection for distributed applications in global health

“…In doing so, we discovered an externally-coupled manifestation of optical crosstalk (ECC), and developed a built-in correction to null the effect. By stabilization over longer integration times and correction of ECC, we have achieved a limit of detection two orders of magnitude lower than previous handheld SiPM-based luminometer designs [ 15 , 18 , 21 , 22 ].…”

“…Previous SiPM-based handheld luminometers [ 15 , 18 , 21 , 22 ] have either made no attempts to mitigate drift in dark current [ 18 , 21 ], or have included peltier-based cooling to stabilize the temperature [ 15 , 22 ]. Although sensor cooling is expected to reduce dark current, the portable device described in [ 15 ] reports a radiometric limit of detection (LOD) of approximately 100 fW of optical power– 100× higher than our device, despite their use of a small-area sensor.…”

“…While some previous SiPM luminometer designs emphasized resolving single photons [ 15 , 18 , 20 , 22 ], our device was designed with maximal light collection and DC signal integrity as the top priorities. We opted against the added cost and complexity of single photon counting electronics, because it only improves SNR if the knowledge of photon arrival times can be used to distinguish signal events from background events, which is generally not the case, as shown in [ 18 ]. Although partial rejection of SiPM optical crosstalk may be achieved by excluding multi-photon events, it was shown previously that SNR was only modestly improved, while both sensitivity and linearity were compromised [ 18 ].…”

A handheld luminometer with sub-attomole limit of detection for distributed applications in global health

“…Beyond commercial luminometers, the landscape of low-cost, portable luminometers reported in the academic literature cannot match the LOD performance standards established by PMT-based commercial instruments ( [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] and Supplementary Table 1). In general, we found that the limit of detection of non-PMT devices in the academic literature ranges 100-to 100,000-fold inferior to commercial PMT-based readers.…”

Realization of a time-correlated photon counting technique for fluorescence analysis

“…Santangelo adopts the net photo current method by subtracting the dark current from the photo current, which requires a precise measurement of the weak current (approximately hundreds of nanoamperometers) [7][8][9]. A photon counting method is also an option for chemiluminescence detection [10]. Another method is a gated charge integration method by which one obtains the charge of the pulse to determine the light intensity [11].…”