An innovative silicon photomultiplier digitizing camera for gamma-ray astronomy

Understand

The single-mirror small-size telescope (SST-1M) is one of the three proposed designs for the small-size telescopes (SSTs) of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) project.

• The SST-1M will be equipped with a 4 m-diameter segmented mirror dish and an innovative fully digital camera based on silicon photo-multipliers (SiPMs).
• Since the SST sub-array will consist of up to 70 telescopes, the challenge is not only to build a telescope with excellent performance, but also to design it so that its components can be commissioned, assembled and tested by industry.
• In this paper we review the basic steps that led to the design concepts for the SST-1M camera and the ongoing realization of the first prototype, with focus on the innovative solutions adopted for the photodetector plane and the readout and trigger parts of the camera.