InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiodes typically work in the gated Geiger mode to achieve near-infrared singlephoton detection. By using ultrashort gates and combining with the robust spike-canceling technique that consists of the capacitance-balancing and low-pass filtering technique, we demonstrate an InGaAs/InP single-photon detector(SPD) with widely tunable repetition rates in this paper. The operation frequency could be tuned conveniently from 100 MHz to 1.25 GHz with the SPD's performance measured to maintain good performance, making it quite suitable for quantum key distribution, laser ranging, and optical time domain reflectometry. Furthermore,the SPD exhibited extremely low-noise characteristics. The detection efficiency of this SPD could reach 20% with the dark count rate of 2.5 × 10^(-6)∕gate and after-pulse probability of 4.1% at 1 GHz.
A single-photon detector is an extremely sensitive device capable of registering photons,offering essential technical support for optics quantum information applications.We review herein our recent experimental progress in the development and application of single-photon detection techniques.Techniques based on advanced self-differencing,low-pass filtering,frequency up-conversion and photon-number-resolving are introduced for attaining high-speed,high-efficiency,low-noise single-photon detection at infrared wavelengths.The advantages of high-speed single-photon detection are discussed in some applications,such as the laser ranging and quantum key distribution.The photon-number-resolving detection is shown to support efficient quantum random number generation.
