Cryogenic design of the high speed CCD60 camera for wavefront sensing

CCD60, developed by e2v technologies, is a 128x128 pixel frame-transfer back-illuminated sensor using the EMCCD technology. This kind of detector has some attractive characteristics, such as high frame rate, low noise and high quantum efficiency. So, it is suitable for Adaptive Optical Wave Front Sensor (AO WFS) applications. However, the performance of this detector is strongly depended on its temperature. In order to achieve high multiplication gain and low dark current noise, CCD60 should be cooled under -45℃. For this reason, we had designed a cooling system to cool down the CCD60 detector base on thermoelectric cooler. Detail of the design, thermal analysis and the cooling experiment are presented in this paper. The performance of multiplication gain after cooling had been tested too. The result of cooling experiment shows that the thermoelectric cooler can cool the CCD to below -60 °C under air cooled operation and an air temperature of 20 °C. The multiplication gain test tell us the multiplication gain of CCD60 can exceed 500 times on -60℃.