Overview: This software provides an interface to simulate the response of Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) to photons emitted by scintillation crystals, as in PET and SPECT systems.
Software description: This software implements a discrete-time discrete-event Monte Carlo (MC) model to simulate SiPM response to scintillation light pulses. The response of a SiPM to optical signals is affected by many factors including photon-detection efficiency, recovery time, gain, optical crosstalk, afterpulsing, dark count, and detector dead time. Many of these parameters vary with overvoltage and temperature. When used to detect scintillation light, there is a complicated non-linear relationship between the incident light and the response of the SiPM. This software accounts for all these aspects of the SiPM response. The software also implements analytic expressions for the single-photoelectron response of the SiPM and the voltage drop across the quenching resistance in the SiPM microcell. These analytic expressions consider the effect of all the circuit elements in the SiPM and accurately simulate the time-variation in overvoltage across the microcells of the SiPM. Consequently, is able to incorporate the variation of the different SiPM parameters with varying overvoltage.
Validation: The software output was validated by comparing with experimental measurements on SiPM-based scintillation detectors. The output was also compared for cases where the SiPM response is known a priori. Further details in publication listed below.
Download link: The software is available for download here.
References: Please reference the following paper when using this software:
A. K. Jha, H. T. van Dam, M. A. Kupinski, E. Clarkson, “Simulating Silicon photomultiplier response to scintillation light”, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., 60(1), 336-51, 2013 (link)
Creators: Authors listed on the article above. The work was done at the lab of Dr. Matthew Kupinski at University of Arizona when Abhinav Jha was a student in that lab.