1304.7447 (Sijing Chen et al.)

Time-of-flight laser ranging and imaging at 1550 nm using low-jitter
superconducting nanowire single-photon detection system    [PDF]

Sijing Chen, Dengkuan Liu, Wenxing Zhang, Lixing You, Yuhao He, Weijun Zhang, Xiaoyan Yang, Guang Wu, Min Ren, Heping Zeng, Zhen Wang, Xiaoming Xie, Mianheng Jiang

We developed a time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) system based on the low-jitter superconducting nanowire single-photon detection (SNSPD) technology. The causes of jitters in the TCSPC system were analyzed. Owing to the low jitter of the SNSPD technology, a system jitter of 26.8 ps full-width at half-maximum was achieved after optimizing the system. We demonstrated time-of-flight laser ranging at 1550 nm wavelength at a stand-off distance of 115 m, based on this TCSPC system. A depth resolution of 4 mm was achieved directly by locating the centroids of each of the two return signals. Laser imaging was also performed using the TCSPC system. This low-jitter TCSPC system using the SNSPD technology presents great potential in long-range measurements and imaging applications for low-energy-level and eye-safe laser systems

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.7447