Imaging air Cherenkov telescopes are usually triggered on a coincidence of
two or sometimes more pixels, with discriminator thresholds in excess of 20
photoelectrons applied for each pixel. These thresholds required to suppress
night-sky background are significantly higher than expected on the basis of a
Poisson distribution in the number of night-sky photoelectrons generated during
the characteristic signal integration time.
We studied noise trigger rates under controlled conditions using an
artificial background light source. Large tails in the PMT amplitude response
to single photoelectrons are identified as a dominant contribution to noise
triggers. The rate of such events is very sensitive to PMT operating
parameters.Comment: 19 pages, latex,epsf, 7 figures appended as uuencoded file, submitted
to Journal of Physics
