Abstract

Photon Counting has become very useful in the applications of Quantum Computing and confirmation of Quantum Entanglement. These scientific applications demand ever higher frame rates and quantum efficiencies, with noise values still low enough to allow photon counting. Photomultiplier tubes and single photon avalanche photodetectors (SPADs) can be used to detect photons. However, a limitation of these devices is that they don’t allow for multiple photon detection. Generally, a read noise below 0.3e- is required to obtain single photon resolution, as shown in Figure 1. In this paper we show that Fairchild Imaging’s HWK4123 9.5Mpixel CMOS image sensor (2308 x 4108) is capable of read noise below 0.3e-, at speeds up to 30fps.