SiPMs and radiation damage recovery — PhD topical course

PhD-level topical course on silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) and the recovery of radiation damage through annealing, taught within the doctoral programme on advanced detectors at the University of Bologna in 2026.

The course goes deep on one specific, open problem. SiPMs are the photon-counting workhorse of the next generation of collider experiments, but they degrade rapidly when exposed to non-ionising radiation — dark count rates can rise by several orders of magnitude after fluences typical of a high-luminosity environment. The good news is that most of that damage is not permanent: controlled thermal annealing recovers a large fraction of the original performance. The interesting question is how much, under what conditions, and at what cost — and that question directly shapes detector design choices in the field right now.

Topics covered

• The physics of SiPMs — from single-photon detection through system-level performance
• Radiation damage mechanisms in silicon: displacement damage, defect creation, dark current evolution
• Annealing strategies: temperature profiles, in-situ vs. ex-situ, time constants, partial recovery
• Characterisation methods used to quantify damage and recovery in the lab and on the beam line
• How these results feed into detector design — specifically the choices being made for the ePIC dRICH and other SiPM-based systems at the EIC

Format. Lectures, journal-club style paper discussions on recent literature, and hands-on analysis exercises using real irradiation and beam test data from the ePIC dRICH R&D programme.