High-speed periodic gating of InGaAs/InP single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) has allowed these detectors to operate at count rates above 10⁸ per second with low afterpulsing. However, a drawback of high-speed periodic gating is that bias gates are applied continuously, regardless of whether an avalanche has occurred or not. This is disadvantageous because gates immediately following an avalanche have elevated afterpulse probabilities, and the additional charge from these secondary events contributes to the overall afterpulse probability. We investigate this phenomenon in a proof-of-principle experiment in which the series of bias gates is briefly interrupted after an avalanche, and we measure the resulting impact on the afterpulse probability. We observe a significant reduction in afterpulsing when such a bias-gate hold-o_ is applied to an InGaAs/InP SPAD gated at 1.25 GHz; when one bias gate is omitted after an avalanche the per-gate afterpulse probability is reduced by more than 40 %. These results indicate that afterpulsing noise at high count rates can be further reduced in high-speed-gated SPADs.

Date Published: 13 May 2019
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10978, Advanced Photon Counting Techniques XIII, 109780C (13 May 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2520620

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10978:
Advanced Photon Counting Techniques XIII
Mark A. Itzler; Joshua C. Bienfang; K. Alex McIntosh, Editor(s)