Single Photon Counters
Single Photon Counting Module. (Proposed by zhen yuan, feel free to edit this page to bounce ideas/methodology)
Idea
Count single photons using photoelectric effect. In simple terms, there is a semiconductor part and an electronics & signal processing part. The semiconductor part is responsible for converting the incident photon into photoelectron. The electronics is responsible for providing the bias voltage to accelerate the photoelectron to create cascading electrons. The electronics is also needed to measure the current and turn that signal into digital signals for a computer to read.
Setup/Equipment
Semiconductor device:
- May need a semiconductor fabrication facility with the ability to make thin films on Silicon.
- Else, we may use a photodiode or even an LED to see how it performs.
Analogue electronics:
- Circuit design to convert analogue signal to digital signal.
Measurements
- Dark room and a light source
- a "professional" quality SPCM to measure said light source
- a computer to display the results/counts.
Potential Problems
- Dark noise may be overwhelming, so we may need to find a way to suppress it. (I suspect this is why commercial devices cost $2k-5k)
- Fabrication cost of the custom semiconductor device may be too high or impractical... gg.com (or we just refurbish an LED/solar panel, this will have lower PDE, but maybe we can use electronics to maximise the PDE.)
- Electronic circuitry costs. (Unlikely to be too costly)