Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “SINGLE PHOTON DETECTOR”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 271 records · Page 15
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1975

An X-ray shadowgraph to locate transient high-energy celestial sources

A new technique has been developed to locate strong, transient X-ray sources such as the recently discovered gamma ray bursts. The instrument, termed a shadowgraph, locates sources by detecting the X-ray shadow cast by a large occulting mask pattern on an imaging detector. Angular resolutions of from 2 to 10 arc minutes are obtainable while essentially full sky coverage is maintained. The optimum energy range of operation is between 20 keV and 100 keV. The high efficiency X-ray imaging detectors, which make it possible to locate bursts with intensities down to approximately 10 photons/sq cm sec, are capable of detecting single 20 keV photons with a spatial resolution of approximately 0.2 mm. The detectors consist of an X-ray to optical conversion phosphor, a multistage image intensifier, and a CCD image readout.

Fishman, G. J.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Fast quantum ghost imaging with a single-photon-sensitive time-stamping camera

Quantum ghost imaging (QGI) leverages correlations between entangled photon pairs to reconstruct an image using light that has never physically interacted with an object. Despite extensive research interest, this technique has long been hindered by slow acquisition speeds, due to the use of raster-scanned detectors or the slow response of intensified cameras. Here, we utilize a single-photon-sensitive time-stamping camera to perform QGI at ultra-low-light levels with rapid data acquisition and processing times, achieving high-resolution and high-contrast images in under 1 min. Our work addresses the trade-off between image quality, optical power, data acquisition time, and data processing time in QGI, paving the way for practical applications in biomedical and quantum-secured imaging.

Mavian, Alex (ORCID:0000000279448830)↗
NASA NTRS2013

Narrow Line X-Ray Calibration Source for High Resolution Microcalorimeters

We are developing a narrow line calibration source for use with X-ray microcalorimeters. At energies below 300 electronvolts fluorescent lines are intrinsically broad, making calibration of high resolution detectors difficult. This source consists of a 405 nanometers (3 electronvolts) laser diode coupled to an optical fiber. The diode is pulsed to create approximately one hundred photons in a few microseconds. If the pulses are short compared to the rise time of the detector, they will be detected as single events with a total energy in the soft X-ray range. Poisson fluctuations in photon number per pulse create a comb of X-ray lines with 3 electronvolts spacing, so detectors with energy resolution better than 2 electronvolts are required to resolve the individual lines. Our currently unstabilized diode has a multimode width less than 1 nanometer, giving a 300 electronvolt event a Full width at half maximum (FWHM) less than 0.1 electronvolts. By varying the driving voltage, or pulse width, the source can produce a comb centered on a wide range of energies. The calibration events are produced at precisely known times. This allows continuous calibration of a flight mission without contaminating the observed spectrum and with minimal deadtime.

high resolution detectors↗
NASA NTRS2011

Blocking Losses on an Optical Communications Link

Many photon-counting photo-detectors have the property that they become inoperative for some time after detection event. We say the detector is blocked during this time.Blocking produces losses when using the detector as a photon-counter to detect a communications signal. In this paper, we characterize blocking losses for single detectors and for arrays of detectors. For arrays, we discuss conditions under which the output may be approximated as a Poisson point process, and provide a simple approximation to the blocking loss. We show how to extend the analysis to arrays of non-uniformly illuminated arrays.

blocked detectors↗
DOE OSTI2022

Low power implementation of high frequency SiPM readout for Cherenkov and scintillation detectors in TOF-PET

State-of-the-art (SoA) electronic readout for silicon photomultiplier (SiPM)-based scintillation detectors that demonstrate experimental limits in achievable coincidence time resolution (CTR) leverage low noise, high frequency signal processing to facilitate a single photon time response that is near the limit of the SiPMs architecture. This readout strategy can optimally exploit fast luminescence and prompt photon populations, and promising measurements show detector concepts employing this readout can greatly advance PET detector CTR, relative to SoA in clinical systems. However, the technique employs power hungry components which make the electronics chain impractical for channel-dense time-of-flight (TOF)-PET detectors. We have developed and tested a low noise and high frequency readout circuit which is performant at low power and consists of discrete elements with small footprints, making it feasible for integration into TOF-PET detector prototypes. A 3 × 3 mm 2 Broadcom SiPM with this readout chain exhibited sub-100 ps single photon time resolution at 10 mW of power consumption, with a relatively minor performance degradation to 120 ± 2 ps FWHM at 5 mW. CTR measurements with 3 × 3 × 20 mm 3 LYSO and fast LGSO scintillators demonstrated 127 ± 3 ps and 113 ± 2 ps FWHM at optimal power operation and 133 ± 2 ps and 121 ± 3 ps CTR at 5 mW. BGO crystals 3 × 3 × 20 mm 3 in size show 271 ± 5 ps FWHM CTR (1174 ± 14 ps full-width-at-tenth-maximum (FWTM)) at optimal power dissipation and 289 ± 8 ps (1296 ± 33 ps FWTM) at 5 mW. The compact and low power readout topology that achieves this performance thereby offers a platform to greatly advance PET system CTR and also opportunities to provide high performance TOF-PET at reduced material cost.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2021

Capacitively Coupled LAPPDs with 2D Pixelated Readout Planes for Time of Flight and Ring Imaging Cherenkov Applications

Large Area Picosecond Photon Detectors (LAPPDs) are micro-channel plate based photosensors featuring hundreds of square centimeters of sensitive area in a single package and capable of providing timing resolution on the order of 50 ps for single photon detection. However, LAPPDs currently do not exist in finely pixelated 2D readout configurations which, in addition to ighresolution timing, would also provide high spatial resolution required for Ring Imaging CHerenkov (RICH) detectors. One of the recent LAPPD models (Gen II) provides the opportunity to overcome the lack of pixellation by coupling an external readout to the sealed detector itself. The readout plane in this case is a simple printed circuit board (PCB) that can be laid out in a custom application-specific way for 1D or 2D sensitive area pixellation. This allows for a much shorter readout-plane prototyping cycle and provides unprecedented flexibility in choosing an appropriate segmentation that can be optimized for any particular detector need in terms of pad size, orientation, and shape.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
NASA NTRS2008

Lidar System for Airborne Measurement of Clouds and Aerosols

A lidar system for measuring optical properties of clouds and aerosols at three wavelengths is depicted. The laser transmitter is based on a Nd:YVO4 laser crystal pumped by light coupled to the crystal via optical fibers from laser diodes that are located away from the crystal to aid in dissipating the heat generated in the diodes and their drive circuits. The output of the Nd:YVO4 crystal has a wavelength of 1064 nm, and is made to pass through frequency-doubling and frequency-tripling crystals. As a result, the net laser output is a collinear superposition of beams at wavelengths of 1064, 532, and 355 nm. The laser operates at a pulse-repetition rate of 5 kHz, emitting per-pulse energies of 50 microJ at 1064 nm, 25 microJ at 532 nm and 50 microJ at 355 nm. An important feature of this system is an integrating sphere located between the laser output and the laser beam expander lenses. The integrating sphere collects light scattered from the lenses. Three energy-monitor detectors are located at ports inside the integrating sphere. Each of these detectors is equipped with filters such that the laser output energy is measured independently for each wavelength. The laser output energy is measured on each pulse to enable the most accurate calibration possible. The 1064-nm and 532-nm photodetectors are, more specifically, single photon-counting modules (SPCMs). When used at 1064 nm, these detectors have approximately 3% quantum efficiency and low thermal noise (fewer than 200 counts per second). When used at 532 nm, the SPCMs have quantum efficiency of about 60%. The photodetector for the 355-nm channel is a photon-counting photomultiplier tube having a quantum efficiency of about 20%. The use of photon-counting detectors is made feasible by the low laser pulse energy. The main advantage of photon-counting is ease of inversion of data without need for complicated calibration schemes like those necessary for analog detectors. The disadvantage of photon-counting detectors is that they inherently have narrow dynamic ranges. However, by using photon-counting detectors along with a high-repetition rate laser, it is possible to obtain wide dynamic range through accumulation of counts over many pulses.

McGill, Matthew↗
NASA NTRS1986

1985 Nuclear Science Symposium, 32nd, and 1985 Symposium on Nuclear Power Systems, 17th, San Francisco, CA, October 23-25, 1985, Proceedings

The present conference ranges over topics in high energy physics instrumentation, detectors, nuclear medical applications, health physics and environmental monitoring, reactor instrumentation, nuclear spacecraft instrumentation, the 'Fastbus' data acquisition system, circuits and systems for nuclear research facilities, and the development status of nuclear power systems. Specific attention is given to CCD high precision detectors, a drift chamber preamplifier, a Cerenkov ring imaging detector, novel scintillation glasses and scintillating fibers, a modular multidrift vertex detector, radial wire drift chambers, liquid argon polarimeters, a multianode photomultiplier, the reliability of planar silicon detectors, the design and manufacture of wedge and strip anodes, ultrafast triode photodetectors, photomultiplier tubes, a barium fluoride plastic scintillator, a fine grained neutron hodoscope, the stability of low leakage silicon photodiodes for crystal calorimeters, and X-ray proportional counters. Also considered are positron emission tomography, single photon emission computed tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, Geiger-Muller detectors, nuclear plant safeguards, a 32-bit Fastbus computer, an advanced light water reactor, and nuclear plant maintenance.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2024

Low Energy Excess and New Physics Searches with MicroBooNE

The MicroBooNE detector is a liquid argon TPC located in the Booster Neutrino Beamline at Fermilab. Leveraging the unique capabilities of the LArTPC technology to distinguish photons from electron showers, one of MicroBooNE's primary goals is to investigate MiniBooNE low energy excess (LEE), an anomalously large observed rate of events containing a single electromagnetic shower. This electromagnetic shower could be caused by electrons, photons, or electron-positron (e+e-) pairs, which would all look very similar in the MiniBooNE Cherenkov detector, but could have distinct signatures in the MicroBooNE LArTPC. In this poster, we present an updated and new search for these signals, including searches for electron neutrino, single-photons, and e+e- pairs.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Low Energy Excess and New Physics Searches with MicroBooNE

The MicroBooNE detector is a liquid argon TPC located in the Booster Neutrino Beamline at Fermilab. Leveraging the unique capabilities of the LArTPC technology to distinguish photons from electron showers, one of MicroBooNE's primary goals is to investigate MiniBooNE low energy excess (LEE), an anomalously large observed rate of events containing a single electromagnetic shower. This electromagnetic shower could be caused by electrons, photons, or electron-positron (e+e-) pairs, which would all look very similar in the MiniBooNE Cherenkov detector, but could have distinct signatures in the MicroBooNE LArTPC. In this poster, we present an updated and new search for these signals, including searches for electron neutrino, single-photons, and e+e- pairs.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
NASA NTRS1985

Photon Detection with Cooled Avalanche Photodiodes: Theory and Preliminary Experimental Results

Avalanche photodiodes (APDs) can be operated in a geiger-tube mode so that they can respond to single electron events and thus be used as photon counting detectors. Operational characteristics and theory of APDs while used in this mode are analyzed and assessed. Preliminary experimental investigation of several commercially available APDs has commenced, and initial results for dark count statistics are presented.

Robinson, D. L.↗
DOE OSTI2020

Constraints on low-mass, relic dark matter candidates from a surface-operated SuperCDMS single-charge sensitive detector

This article presents an analysis and the resulting limits on light dark matter inelastically scattering off of electrons, and on dark photon and axionlike particle absorption, using a second-generation SuperCDMS high-voltage eV-resolution detector. The 0.93 g Si detector achieved a 3 eV phonon energy resolution; for a detector bias of 100 V, this corresponds to a charge resolution of 3% of a single electron-hole pair. The energy spectrum is reported from a blind analysis with 1.2 g-days of exposure acquired in an above-ground laboratory. With charge carrier trapping and impact ionization effects incorporated into the dark matter signal models, the dark matter-electron cross section σ ¯ e is constrained for dark matter masses from 0.5 to 10 4 MeV / c 2 ; in the mass range from 1.2 to 50 eV / c 2 the dark photon kinetic mixing parameter ϵ and the axioelectric coupling constant g a e are constrained. The minimum 90% confidence-level upper limits within the above-mentioned mass ranges are σ ¯ e = 8.7 × 10 - 34 cm 2 , ϵ = 3.3 × 10 - 14 , and g a e = 1.0 × 10 - 9 .

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2026

Optimal filtering and generation of entangled photons for quantum applications in the presence of noise

Filtering is commonly used in quantum optics to reject noise photons, and also to enable interference between independent photons. However, filtering the joint spectrum of photon pairs can reduce the inherent coincidence probability or loss-independent heralding efficiency. Here we investigate filtering for multiphoton applications based on entanglement and interference (e.g., quantum teleportation). We multiplex C-band entangled photons and C-band classical communications into the same long-distance fibers, which enables scalable low-loss quantum networking but requires filtering of spontaneous Raman scattering noise from classical light. Using tunable-bandwidth filters, low-jitter detectors, and polarization filters, we distribute wavelength-degenerate time-bin entangled photons in the C band (1536.5 nm) over 25 km/25 km standard fibers (50 km) each carrying 10 Gbit/s C-band classical data signals. Narrow filtering enables milliwatt-level C-band power, which exceeds the power achieved by comparable studies by roughly an order of magnitude and could feasibly support terabit per second classical rates. We evaluate how performance depends on pump and filter bandwidths, multipair emission, filter shapes, loss, phase matching, and how quantum information is measured. We find a trade-off between reducing noise impact and increasing single-mode purity, and discuss mitigation methods toward optimal multiphoton applications. Importantly, these results apply to noise in free space and in quantum devices (sources, frequency converters, switches, detectors, etc.) and provide insight into filter-induced degradation of single-photon purity and rates even in noise-free environments.

Thomas, Jordan M. [Fermilab; Northwestern U.]↗
DOE OSTI2026

Inclusive Search for Anomalous Single-Photon Production in MicroBooNE

The MicroBooNE experiment is an 85-ton active volume liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) neutrino detector situated in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam. One of the main goals for MicroBooNE is to investigate the “low energy excess” (LEE) of electromagnetic events observed by the MiniBooNE experiment by leveraging the unique capabilities of the LArTPC technology to distinguish photons from electron electromagnetic showers. In this poster, we present an inclusive search for anomalous production of single-photon events from neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE experiment, motivated by the MiniBooNE LEE. The analysis uses the Wire-Cell reconstruction framework to select a sample of inclusive single-photon final-state interactions and leverages simultaneous measurements of sidebands to constrain signal and background predictions and reduce uncertainties. We perform a blind analysis using a dataset collected from February 2016 to July 2018 from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab. In the full signal region, we observe agreement between the data and the prediction, with a goodness-of-fit p-value of 0.11. We then isolate a sub-sample of these events containing no visible protons, and observe 93 $/pm$ 22(stat.) $\pm$ 35(syst.) data events above prediction, corresponding to just above 2$\sigma$ local significance, concentrated at shower energies below 600 MeV.

Yandel, Erin [Los Alamos] (ORCID:0000000277123709)↗
DOE OSTI2025

Time-resolved detectors for quantum ghost imaging

Quantum ghost imaging is a method that utilizes the correlated detection of two photons to generate an image. One photon is detected by an imaging sensor and the other by a single-element bucket detector. The selection of the imaging sensor and its capabilities relative to the bucket detector impact the quality of the ghost images. This work examines a SPAD array and a photocathode detector as imaging sensors for quantum ghost imaging. We discuss how to achieve optimal images using these two technologies. We also demonstrate that these devices are able to generate ghost images at 1Hz frame rates, expanding the technique to biologically relevant time scales.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
NASA NTRS2018

The Challenges of Measuring Methane from Space with a Lidar

The global and regional quantification of methane fluxes and identification of its sources and sinks has been highlighted as one of the goals of the NASA 2017 Earth Science Decadal Survey. Detecting methane from space and airborne platforms with an active (laser) remote sensing instrument presents several unique technology and measurement challenges. The instrument must have a single frequency, narrow-linewidth light source, and photon-sensitive detector at the right spectral region to make continuous measurements from orbit, day and night, all seasons and at all latitudes. It must have a high signal to noise ratio and must be relatively immune to biases from aerosol/cloud scattering, spectroscopic and meteorological data uncertainties, and instrument systematic errors. At Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in collaboration with industry, we have developed an airborne instrument to measure methane. Our instrument is a nadir-viewing lidar that uses Integrated Path Differential Absorption (IPDA), to measure methane near 1.65 µm. We sample the absorption line using multiple wavelengths from a narrow linewidth laser source and a sensitive photodetector. This measurement approach provides maximum information content about the CH4 column, and minimizes biases in the XCH4 retrieval. In this paper, we will review our progress to date and discuss the technology challenges, options and tradeoffs to measure methane from space and airborne platforms.

airborne instruments↗
NASA NTRS1986

Thermal detectors for high resolution spectroscopy

Cryogenic microcalorimeters can be made sensitive enough to measure the energy deposited by a single particle or X-ray photon with an accuracy of about one electron volt. It may also be possible to construct detectors of several-kilograms mass whose resolution is only a few times worse than this. Data from relatively crude test devices are in good agreement with thermal performance calculations, and a total system noise of 11 eV FWHM has been obtained for a silicon detector operating at 98 mK. Observations of 35 eV FWHM for 6-keV X-rays with a different device have been made.

Mccammon, D.↗