Fundamental Studies of Single Photon Detection with Avalanche Photodiodes
Abstract
Accomplishments: Theory effort: Pfisters group carried out the theoretical evaluation of the photon-count positive-operator-valued measurements for the segmented detector. Results showed that photon number resolution detection is indeed achievable in the ideal case. This opens a new path to photon number resolution devices that operate at room temperature and can be manufactured with available integrated photonic technology. The number of integrated APDs appears to be, to a large extent, the dominant factor toward high-quality photon number resolution detection. While photon losses must also be taken in to account, of course, it is important to note that they do not include the quantum efficiency of the APDs, by design of the segmented detector. The reduction of photon losses will therefore only involve passive optical design considerations, a notable difference with butt-coupled tree-splitting detectors. Details of this work are provided in Appendix 1: Photon-number-resolving segmented avalanche-photodiode detectors. Segmented avalanche photodiodes: A novel segmented waveguide photodetector based on a directional coupler design was developed and demonstrated. By matching the imaginary parts of the propagation constants of the even and odd modes in the design, a 6-element photodiode array achieved an internal responsivity as high as 1.13 A/W in agreement with simulations. This design can be extended to applications in travelling wave photodiodes and in the photon number resolving detectors that were studied in this program owing to their near-unity quantum efficiency and minimized active volumes. Details of this work are provided in Appendix 2: Segmented waveguide photodetector with 90% quantum efficiency.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 30, 2018
- Accession Number
- AD1067415
Entities
People
- Joe Campbell
Organizations
- University of Virginia