Links to Detectors and other photon counters are provided as a convenience. Marina Photonics has confidence that the end user can discern fact from specs spin. Marina Photonics specializes in sustained Gigahertz Photon Counting that is AFFORDABLE!
Dead time is the time when a photon arrives and is not counted. This might occur for overlapping photons or photons separated by very short times or for all usb systems during readout. TTL output devices often have 10 ns dead times and FIFO size limit sustained count rates. Not being able to count during output to a computer is also dead time. Beware of After-Pulse detector rates that increase with quantum efficiency which have long recovery dead times. BEWARE of spec spin.
Many 'Photon Counters' are just detectors with an amplifier-discriminator and TTL pulse out that don't 'count' at all. Time Correlated Single Photon Counters are boards for computers, NIM (Nuclear Instrumentation Modules) for NIM bins, USB units, or Stand-Alone systems. Marina Photonics supplies lost-free GHz counting with SUSTAINED USB3 computer input at 200 Megabytes/second as well as lossless SUSTAINED 400 Megabyte/second DIO computer input independent of FIFO buffer limitations. Four channel 400 Megabyte/second GHz rates are forthcoming soon.
Please see Photon Counting Secrets on the first page of the web site.
Stanford Research Systems SR430 is Marina In-house available for photon counting comparisons, but the SR430 is out of production.The SR430 cannot reliably see sub-nanosecond width photon pulses, but the PV16 and P1TTL can stretch the pulse to reliable widths for use with the SR430. https://www.thinksrs.com/
