Improved free-running InGaAs/InP single-photon avalanche diode detectors operating at room temperature

Abstract

Room-temperature operation of InGaAs/InP single-photon avalanche diode detectors operating in free-running mode, with no electrical gating, is demonstrated. An improved design of device structure permitted significantly lower dark count rates than previously reported. Free-running operation at room temperature using an incident wavelength of 1550 nm gave a noise equivalent power of 1.5 Â 10 215 WHz 21/2 with improved photon timing jitter.InGaAs/InP single-photon avalanche diode detectors (SPADs) are favoured in a number of applications for single-photon detection at wavelengths around 1550 nm, e.g. quantum key distribution (QKD) [1]. Gated quenching, in various guises, including the use of active quenching circuits [2], has been implemented in many of these applications to limit the charge flow per event to reduce the detrimental effects of the afterpulsing phenomenon. This has permitted gating frequencies greater than 1 GHz and high count-rates at the expense of gate 'on' times. For applications such as time-resolved photoluminescence and time-of-flight laser ranging [3] long 'on' periods are required to most efficiently extract the information about the sample, or target, respectively. Ideally, a free-running detector [4] would be preferred for such applications. Recently, we reported the use of a Princeton Lightwave Inc. (PLI) InGaAs/InP SPAD employing passive quenching at low excess biases [5] which illustrated the first report of an InGaAs/ InP SPAD operating free-running at room temperature. In this work, different characteristics of device performance can be exploited depending on the choice of quenching resistor; the lower Rs the faster the recharging of the diode after an avalanche event, however with a greater Rs a higher bias could be applied resulting in higher singlephoton detection efficiency (SPDE) and lower photon-timing jitter. With the first generation of PLI InGaAs/InP SPADs we were able to achieve 3% SPDE at most temperatures and a maximum count-rate of 4 Mc/s [5]. Significantly, the low dark count rates (DCR) found in these experiments meant room-temperature operation could be achieved in free-running mode with negligible effects of afterpulsing evident. 220 240 260 temperature, K n e w g e n e ra ti o n S P A D fi rs t g e n e ra ti o n S P A D 280 300 NEP, WHz -12 Fig. 1 Minimum NEP at l ¼ 1550 nm against temperature for first and new generation InGaAs/InP SPADs operated in low excess bias passive quenching mode using 100 kV quenching resistorRecently, a new generation of 1550 nm wavelength SPAD designs was developed by PLI including negative feedback provided by the monolithic integration of a thin film resistor [6]. In the work reported in this Letter, reference samples from the same generation of devices described in [6] were used in conjunction with an external resistor to provide quenching. The SPAD design differs from that reported previously [5] in that the electric field within the InP multiplication region is designed to be significantly lower in Geiger-mode in order to suppress da...

Invited Review Article: Single-photon sources and detectors

“…As a result, IR SPADs are inferior to Si SPADs in all characteristics, although there are significant efforts focused on addressing this problem. [99][100][101][102] The surge of research interest in the field of quantum information over the last few decades led to a concomitant surge in research into single-photon sources and single-photon detectors. This growth is clear from the citation-database search results shown in Fig.…”

Infrared single photon detector based on optical up-converter at 1550 nm

“…A desired single photon detector should be the one that falls in the bottom right area in NEP-PDE diagram, which means high PDE, low NEP and high SNR.

Figure 7The NEP and PDE achievements for different kind of single photon detectors. Free-running InGaAs SPADs 15,39–41 were plotted as black squares. Gate-mode InGaAs SPADs 14,42–44 and optical up-conversion SPADs 8,11,45,46 were shown as red circles and blue triangles respectively.

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Single photon avalanche detectors: prospects of new quenching and gain mechanisms

“…A DCR of 12 kHz and timing resolution of 140 ps was reported for epitaxial InGaAs-InP SPAD [56]. Room temperature free-running InGaAs/InP SPADs were developed by Warburton, et al [57]. A DCR of 60 kHz was measured, however, with a bitrate of only 32 kHz.…”