Characterization and on-field performance of the MuTe Silicon Photomultipliers

Abstract

A: The Muon Telescope is a muography experiment for imaging volcanoes in Colombia. It consists of a scintillator tracking system and a water Cherenkov detector used for particle deposited energy measurement. The MuTe operates autonomously in high altitude environments where the temperature gradient reaches up to 10 • C. In this work, we characterize the breakdown voltage, gain, and noise of the telescope silicon photomultipliers for temperature variations spanning 0 to 40 • C. We demonstrated that the discrimination threshold for the MuTe hodoscope must be above 5 pe to avoid contamination due to the SiPM dark count, crosstalk, and afterpulsing. We also assess the MuTe counting rate depending on day-night temperature variations.