Ultra-narrowband interference circuits enable low-noise and high-rate photon counting for InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiodes
Yuanbin Fan, Tingting Shi, Weijie Ji, Lai Zhou, Ji Yang, Zhiliang Yuan
Abstract
Afterpulsing noise in InGaAs/InP single photon avalanche photodiodes (APDs) is caused by carrier trapping and can be suppressed successfully through limiting the avalanche charge via sub-nanosecond gating. Detection of faint avalanches requires an electronic circuit that is able to effectively remove the gate-induced capacitive response while keeping photon signals intact. Here we demonstrate a novel ultra-narrowband interference circuit (UNIC) that can reject the capacitive response by up to 80 dB per stage with little distortion to avalanche signals. Cascading two UNIC’s in a readout circuit, we were able to enable a high count rate of up to 700 MC/s and a low afterpulsing of 0.5 % at a detection efficiency of 25.3 % for 1.25 GHz sinusoidally gated InGaAs/InP APDs. At a temperature of -30 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:msup> <mml:mi/> <mml:mo>∘</mml:mo> </mml:msup> </mml:math> C, we measured an afterpulsing probability of 1 % at a detection efficiency of 21.2 %.