Development of a near-infrared photon-counting system using an InGaAs avalanche photodiode

Maruyama, Tomoyuki; Narusawa, Fumio; Kudo, Makoto; Tanaka, M.; Saito, Yasunori; Nomura, Akio

doi:10.1117/1.1431556

Cited by 30 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Outwith this region, the MPE is substantially more favourable, allowing the use of much higher pulse energies. The wavelength region near 1.6 µm, the telecom window, is particularly attractive for lidar as a wealth of telecommunications technologies can be applied and low-cost high-sensitivity detectors, such as avalanche photodiodes 12 , are available.…”

Section: Choice Of Laser Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

A flexible eye-safe lidar instrument for elastic-backscatter and DIAL

et al. 2012

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Section: Choice Of Laser Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

A flexible eye-safe lidar instrument for elastic-backscatter and DIAL

et al. 2012

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“…There is great interest in the area of single photon detectors coming from a wide range of applications including: single molecule fluorescence detection 3 , quantum computation with linear optics 4 , linear quantum cryptography 5 , eye-safe LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) 6 and QKD 7 . In the area of single photon detectors there are several methods by which to achieve single photon detection namely the photomultiplier tube (PMT), microchannel plate (MCP), charge coupled device (CCD), superconducting single photon detector (SSPD) 8 , and the Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode or SPAD 9 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High bit rate germanium single photon detectors for 1310nm

Seamons¹,

Carroll²

2008

SPIE Proceedings

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There is increasing interest in development of high speed, low noise and readily fieldable near infrared (NIR) single photon detectors. InGaAs/InP Avalanche photodiodes (APD) operated in Geiger mode (GM) are a leading choice for NIR due to their preeminence in optical networking. After-pulsing is, however, a primary challenge to operating InGaAs/InP single photon detectors at high frequencies 1 . After-pulsing is the effect of charge being released from traps that trigger false ("dark") counts. To overcome this problem, hold-off times between detection windows are used to allow the traps to discharge to suppress after-pulsing. The hold-off time represents, however, an upper limit on detection frequency that shows degradation beginning at frequencies of ~100 kHz in InGaAs/InP. Alternatively, germanium (Ge) single photon avalanche photodiodes (SPAD) have been reported to have more than an order of magnitude smaller charge trap densities than InGaAs/InP SPADs 2 , which allowed them to be successfully operated with passive quenching 2 (i.e., no gated hold off times necessary), which is not possible with InGaAs/InP SPADs, indicating a much weaker dark count dependence on hold-off time consistent with fewer charge traps. Despite these encouraging results suggesting a possible higher operating frequency limit for Ge SPADs, little has been reported on Ge SPAD performance at high frequencies presumably because previous work with Ge SPADs has been discouraged by a strong demand to work at 1550 nm. NIR SPADs require cooling, which in the case of Ge SPADs dramatically reduces the quantum efficiency of the Ge at 1550 nm. Recently, however, advantages to working at 1310 nm have been suggested which combined with a need to increase quantum bit rates for quantum key distribution (QKD) motivates examination of Ge detectors performance at very high detection rates where InGaAs/InP does not perform as well. Presented in this paper are measurements of a commercially available Ge APD operated at relatively short GM hold-off times to examine whether there are potential advantages to using Ge for 1310 nm single photon detection. A weaker after-pulsing dependence on frequency is observed offering initial indications of the potential that Ge APDs might provide better high frequency performance.

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“…These advantages have led APDs to a wide variety of applications. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] However, when APDs work in avalanche mode, which triggers an avalanche of hot carriers on absorption of a photon, photons have been found to be emitted from the avalanche region. [8][9][10][11][12][13] This photon emission may cause some background noise when another detector absorbs the photons, or when the optical system is set up so that photons emitted from a detector can be reflected back on it.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Photon emission characteristics of avalanche photodiodes

et al. 2005

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Temporal decay of photon emission from avalanche photodiodes ͑APDs͒ is demonstrated. The steep rise of the reverse voltage can cause a higher probability of photon emission. For a silicon avalanche photodiode, the photon emission has a broad spectral distribution from 500 to 1100 nm with two peaks at 750 and 994 nm, respectively. The number of emitted photons increases by 44 Mcount/ ͑s mA sr͒ as the APD's reverse current increases. This suggests that the reverse current, instead of the reverse voltage, applied to the APD is the main determinant of the photon emission. It is furthermore shown that the distribution of the photon emission is a super-Poisson distribution.

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Development of a near-infrared photon-counting system using an InGaAs avalanche photodiode

Cited by 30 publications

References 12 publications

A flexible eye-safe lidar instrument for elastic-backscatter and DIAL

A flexible eye-safe lidar instrument for elastic-backscatter and DIAL

High bit rate germanium single photon detectors for 1310nm

Photon emission characteristics of avalanche photodiodes

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