Advances in solid state photon detectors

Abstract

Semiconductor photodiodes were developed in the early `Forties approximately at the time when the photomultiplier tube became a commercial product (RCA 1939). Only in recent years, with the invention of the Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes, have the semiconductor photo detectors reached sensitivity comparable to that of photomultiplier tubes. The evolution started in the `Sixties with the p-i-n (PIN) photodiode, a very successful device, which is still used in many detectors for high energy physics and a large number of other applications like radiation detection and medical imaging. The next step was the development of the avalanche photodiode (APD) leading to a substantial reduction of noise but not yet achieving single photon response. The weakest light flashes that can be detected by the PIN diode need to contain several hundreds of photons. An improvement of the sensitivity by 2 orders of magnitude was achieved by the development of the avalanche photodiode, a device with internal gain. At the end of the millennium, the semiconductor detectors evolved with the Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode into highly sensitive devices, which have an internal gain comparable to the gain of photomultiplier tubes and a response to single photons. A review of the semiconductor photo detector design and development, the properties and problems, some applications and a speculative outlook on the future evolution will be presented.

Polarized single photon emission and photon bunching from an InGaN quantum dot on a GaN micropyramid

“…The photons emitted from the sample were collected by the same objective and guided through a monochromator with the focal length of 550 mm, allowing a spectral resolution of 0.28 meV. Micro-photoluminescence (µPL) spectra were recorded, either by a charge coupled device (CCD) or by a photo multiplier tube (PMT) [11] operating in the photon counting mode. Time correlated single photon spectroscopy (TCSPS) measurements were performed in the same setup converted to a HanburyBrown and Twiss interferometer (HBT) by a beam splitter in the signal path, guiding half of the signal through another monochromator to a second PMT [12].…”

X-ray ionization yields and energy spectra in liquid argon

“…The latter experimental setup was identical to that of ref. [7] where the first results on the performance of the combined multiplier composed of THGEMs [12] and a matrix of Geiger-mode APDs (GAPDs, [13]) in the two-phase CRAD were presented; the setup photograph is shown in Fig. 2.…”

Linearly polarized single photon antibunching from a site-controlled InGaN quantum dot

“…17 A 50/50 beam splitter directed the photons in each leg through a monochromator to an avalanche photo diode (APD). 18 Time differences between subsequent photons were recorded by a TCSPC module with an overall instrument time constant s i ¼ 0.7 ns, and histograms were generated with the bin-width set to s BW ¼ 512 ps. For the pulsed excitation, a frequency tripled Ti-sapphire laser generated ps excitation pulses at 266 nm wavelength, and a reflective objective (NA ¼ 0.5) was used to focus the light to a spot size of $2 lm and to collect the luminescence.…”