Performance characteristics of thick p-channel skipper CCDs after proton bombardment

Le résumé fourni par la source

Skipper charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are an offshoot of standard silicon CCD pixel detectors and are capable of performing repeated non-destructive charge measurements, enabling deeply sub-electron readout noise. This capability has opened the door to single-photon counting from the near-infrared (∼1.1 μm) to the soft X-ray (several keV), making these devices strong candidates for future astronomical instruments operating in the photon-starved limit. Furthermore, the p-channel architecture used to fabricate Skipper CCDs on n-type silicon has been demonstrated to have an increased resilience to the intense radiation environment of space. Building upon previous irradiation campaigns on room-temperature skipper CCDs, here we describe the first radiation-hardness tests of p-channel skipper CCDs at their cryogenic operating temperatures. We assess the performance of the floating-gate output stage and global CCD parameters (charge transfer inefficiency, dark current, hot pixels, and charge traps). We find that these devices maintain excellent performance after displacement damage doses equivalent to ∼10 years at the Earth/Sun L2 Lagrange point, demonstrating for the first time that these sensors remain radiation-hard under realistic deep-space operating conditions.

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