Low energy depositions using smart electronic readout on Skipper-CCD for lightweight Dark Matter experiment

Abstract

Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs) sensors have been at the forefront of high precision and resolution imaging ever since their development. Scientific CCDs and the Skipper-CCD pushed the boundaries for sensing very weak ionizing particles, as they allow to detect without error the charge signal (even a single electron-hole pair) collected on every pixel of the detector. To obtain such precision these sensors have a slow readout time, and this has the effect of producing images with multiple particles crossing the active detection region, hindering the posterior analysis. Recently, a new electronic controller was created, the Low Threshold Acquisition or LTA. The LTA allows to perform Skipper-precision readout on selected regions of the detector. This work presents the first physics experiment utilizing the LTA ever conducted, where the spatial distribution of single electron events is studied and compared against a computational model of photon production by Cherenkov radiation, finding a close agreement between both distributions.