A very Jow noise measurement system is described with a noise temperature of 0.5 K consisting of a mercury wetted reed switch, low noise preamplifier, and synchronous detector. The set-up can te tuned from 20 kHz up to 3.15 GHz corresponding to the bandwidth of relay and prcamplifieI'. The shot noise of CdSjCulnSe2-photodiode,s has been investigated. Deviations from the expected behaviour indic...

We report a procedure to detect mid-infrared single photons at 4.65 microm by means of a two-stage scheme based on sum-frequency generation, by using a periodically poled lithium niobate nonlinear crystal and a silicon avalanche photodiode. An experimental investigation shows that, in addition to a high timing resolution, this technique yields a detection sensitivity of 1.24 pW with 63 mW of ne...

We report operation and characterization of a lab-assembled single-photon detector based on commercial silicon avalanche photodiodes (PerkinElmer C30902SH, C30921SH). Dark count rate as low as 5 Hz was achieved by cooling the photodiodes down to -80 °C. While afterpulsing increased as the photodiode temperature was decreased, total afterpulse probability did not become significant due to detect...

We demonstrated a laser ranging system with single photon detection at 1550 nm. The single-photon detector was a 1-GHz sine-wave gated InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiode. In daylight, 8-cm depth resolution was achieved directly by using a time-of-flight approach based on time-correlated single photon counting measurement. This system presented a potential for low energy level and eye-safe laser ra...

The excess noise factor (ENF) of a large area avalanche photodiode was measured as a function of gain for different temperatures, in the 40 to 27 C range. Results show that ENF does not depend significantly with temperature attaining values of about 1.8 and 2.3 for gains of 50 and 300, respectively. r 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 29.40.Wk; 85.60.Dw; 85.60.Jb

Performance characteristics of the response of a Peltier-cooled large-area avalanche photodiode are investigated. Detector gain, energy linearity, energy resolution and minimum detectable energy are studied at different operation temperatures. Detector energy resolution and lowest detectable X-ray energy present a strong improvement as the operation temperature is reduced from 25 to 15 C and sl...

We discuss the structural consideration of high-speed photodetectors used for optical communications, focusing on vertical illumination suitable device fabrication and coupling. fabricate an avalanche photodiode that can handle 100-Gbit/s four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (50 Gbaud) signals, pin photodiodes 100-Gbaud operation; both are fabricated with our unique inverted p-side down (p-dow...

We have evaluated the performance of a prototype 16-channel avalanche photodiode (APD) array developed primarily for scintillating-fiber (SCIFI) tracking detectors. The APD array was coupled to a 2.5 m long SCIFI array, and the detection efficiency was measured for minimum ionizing particles passing through the SCIFI array. The APD array was cooled to −50◦C to improve the S/N ratio. We have fou...

There is an increasing need for identifying the number of photons that is contained within a weak light pulse or time interval of a weak cw light field. A device capable of photon-number resolution would contribute both to fundamental research in the area of quantum optics and to more-or-less practical quantum communication systems, such as quantum key distribution schemes [1]. In the former ca...