Development of a Modern Cosmic Ray Telescope based on Silicon Photomultipliers for use in High Schools*

Lately, a new light sensor technology based on the breakdown phenomenon in the reverse biased silicon diode has found many applications that span from particle physics to medical imaging science. The silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) has several notable advantages compared to conventional photomultiplier tubes which include: lower cost, lower operating voltage and the ability to measure very weak light signals at the single photon level. At this conference meeting, we describe our efforts to implement SiPMs as read out light detectors for plastic scintillators in a cosmic ray telescope for use in high schools. In particular, we describe our work in designing, testing and assembling the cosmic ray telescope. We include a high gain preamplifier, a custom coincidence circuit using fast comparators to discriminate the SiPM signal amplitudes and a monovibrator IC for lengthening the singles and coincidence logic pulses. An Arduino micro-controller and program sketches are used for processing and storing the singles and coincidence counts data. Results from our measurements would be illustrated and presented.