Single-Electron and Single-Photon Sensitivity with a Silicon Skipper CCD

TIFFENBERG, JAVIER; SOFO-HARO, MIGUEL; DRLICA-WAGNER, ALEX; ESSIG, ROUVEN; GUARDINCERRI, YANN; HOLLAND, STEVE; VOLANSKY, TOMER; YU, TIEN-TIEN

PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2017 vol. 119

0031-9007

We have developed ultralow-noise electronics in combination with repetitive, nondestructive readout ofa thick, fully depleted charge-coupled device (CCD) to achieve an unprecedented noise level of0.068 e− rms/pixel. This is the first time that discrete subelectron readout noise has been achievedreproducible over millions of pixels on a stable, large-area detector. This enables the contemporaneous,discrete, and quantized measurement of charge in pixels, irrespective of whether they contain zero electronsor thousands of electrons. Thus, the resulting CCD detector is an ultra-sensitive calorimeter. It is alsocapable of counting single photons in the optical and near-infrared regime. Implementing this innovativenon-destructive readout system has a negligible impact on CCD design and fabrication, and there are nearlyimmediate scientific applications. As a particle detector, this CCD will have unprecedented sensitivity tolow-mass dark matter particles and coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering, while future astronomicalapplications may include direct imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets.