To meet evolving ballistic missile threats, advanced seekers will include a multi-modal imaging capability in which a passive singleor multi-band infrared focal plane array (FPA) shares a common aperture with an active laser radar (LADAR) receiver – likely, a photon-counting LADAR receiver that can resolve photon times of arrival with subnanosecond resolution. The overall success of such a syst...

A lidar detects atmospheric parameters by transmitting laser pulse to the atmosphere and receiving the backscattering signals from molecules and aerosol particles. Because of the small backscattering cross section, a lidar usually uses the high sensitive photomultiplier and avalanche photodiode as detector and uses photon counting technology for collection of weak backscatter signals. Photon Co...

Avalanche photodiodes, which operate above the breakdown voltage in Geiger mode connected with avalanche-quenching circuits, can be used to detect single photons and are therefore called singlephoton avalanche diodes SPAD's. Circuit configurations suitable for this operation mode are critically analyzed and their relative merits in photon counting and timing applications are assessed. Simple pa...

Material composition can be estimated from spectral information acquired using photon counting x-ray detectors with pulse height analysis. Non-ideal effects in photon counting x-ray detectors such as charge-sharing, k-escape, and pulse-pileup distort the detected spectrum, which can cause material decomposition errors. This work compared the performance of two empirical decomposition methods: a...

Faint light spectroscopy has many important applications such as fluorescence spectroscopy, lidar, and astronomical observations. However, the long measurement time limits its application to real-time measurement. In this work, a photon counting reconstructive spectrometer combining metasurfaces superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors is proposed. A prototype device was fabricated on s...

The recent experiment of Parigi et al. [Science 317, 1890 (2007)] shows, in agreement with theory, that subtraction of one photon can increase the expectation value of the number of photons in the thermal state. This observation agrees with the standard photon counting model in which the quantum jump superoperator (QJS) gives a count rate proportional to the number of photons. An alternate mode...

Introduction: This paper analyses the ability of single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) for neural imaging. The current trend in the production of SPADs moves toward the minimumdark count rate (DCR) and maximum photon detection probability (PDP). Moreover, the jitter response which is the main measurement characteristic for the timing uncertainty is progressing. Methods: The neural imaging pro...

A monolithic circuit has been designed for active-quenching and active-reset of single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs), which operate above the breakdown voltage BD for detecting single photons. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully integrated circuit of this kind ever reported. It can operate with any available SPAD device, since it generates pulses high enough to quench detect...