CAEN Educational Events
CAEN Seminar at the University of Seville – Erasmus Mundus Partnership 2026
November 16 - November 19
From November 16th to 19th, 2026, CAEN will return to the University of Seville for its annual visit to the Department of Applied Physics, as part of the ongoing collaboration with the Erasmus Mundus program.
As in previous years, CAEN will be in Seville for the week, with dedicated activities for students taking place on Tuesday, November 17th, and Wednesday, November 18th. The seminar will offer students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of nuclear and particle physics instrumentation, with hands-on sessions and demonstrations led by CAEN staff.
This visit reaffirms CAEN’s long-standing partnership with the University of Seville and its commitment to supporting the Erasmus Mundus community through direct engagement with students and researchers.
Silicon Photomultipliers have largely replaced photomultiplier tubes in scintillation-based radiation detection, calorimetry and particle tracking, thanks to their compactness, low bias voltage, insensitivity to magnetic fields and single-photon resolution. Using them well requires understanding both the device — gain, breakdown voltage, dark count rate, crosstalk, and their dependence on bias and temperature — and the electronics that reads it out, since in real systems the two cannot be designed independently.
The course covers the working principle and the main parameters of SiPMs and their use with and without a coupled scintillator. It then moves to the readout problem, comparing waveform digitizers, which provide complete pulse-shape information, with ASIC-based front-ends such as the CAEN FERS-5200 platform: by integrating multichannel charge and timing measurement, per-channel bias adjustment and data acquisition in a compact unit, FERS makes the same measurement affordable and scalable from a single sensor up to the very large channel counts of modern experiments.
These concepts are then put into practice: starting from the acquisition software, participants will get hands-on experience with a SiPM read out by an A5202 unit, in measurements ranging from the sensor response to light pulses up to spectrum acquisition, using either a LED driver or a coupled crystal or scintillator.
