Single-Photon Detectors Modeling and Selection Criteria for High-Background LiDAR

High-efficiency single-photon detectors.

Visible light photon counters (VLPCs) and solid-state photomultipliers (SSPMs) are high-efficiency single-photon detectors which have multi-photon counting capability. While both the VLPCs and the SSPMs have inferred internal quantum efficiencies above 93%, the actual measured values for both the detectors were in fact limited to less than 88%, attributed to in-coupling losses. We are currently...

Single Photon Counting Detectors for TCSPC

Semiconductor optical single-photon detectors

Avalanche Photodiodes (APDs) connected with quenching circuits can be used for single photon detection. This semiconductor photon detector has a better performance than photomultiplier. The principles and applications of APDs are presented. Features, performance of different commercial devices are introduced and compared. Recent research progress based on the improvement of quenching circuits a...

Photon Sorters and QND Detectors Using Single Photon Emitters

We discuss a new method for realizing number-resolving and non-demolition photo detectors by strong coupling of light to individual single photon emitters, which act as strong optical nonlinearities. As a specific application we show how these elements can be integrated into an error-proof Bell state analyzer, whose efficiency exceeds the best possible performance with linear optics even for a ...

Niobium Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors

We investigate the performance of superconducting nanowire photon detectors fabricated from ultra-thin Nb. A direct comparison is made between these detectors and similar nanowire detectors fabricated from NbN. We find that Nb detectors are significantly more susceptible than NbN to thermal instability (latching) at high bias. We show that the devices can be stabilized by reducing the input res...