LYSO crystal calorimeter readout with silicon photomultipliers

Large area Silicon PhotoMultipliers (SiPMs) are the new frontier of the development of readout systems for scintillating detectors. A SiPM consists of a matrix of parallel-connected silicon micropixels operating in limited Geiger-Muller avalanche mode, and thus working as independent photon counters with a very high gain (similar to 10(6)). This contribution presents the performance in terms of linearity and energy resolution of an electromagnetic homogeneous calorimeter composed of 9 similar to 18X(0) LYSO crystals. The crystals were readout by 36 4 x 4 mm(2) SiPMs (4 for each crystal) produced by FBK-irst. This calorimeter was tested at the Beam Test Facility at the LINEN laboratories in Frascati with a single- and multi-particle electron beam in the 100-500 MeV energy range.