May 2021
Spotlight Summary by Paul McManamon
Compact long-range single-photon imager with dynamic imaging capability
This article discusses a single detector, 1550 nm, lidar that uses a photon counting receiver, referred to as a SPAD (single-photon avalanche diode), or a GmAPD (Geiger-mode avalanche photodetector), detector. 1550 nm is of course an eye safe wavelength region. The lidar uses a fiber laser, and isolates the transmitter from the receiver by timing the emitted pulses when the detector will not receive them. Acousto-optical modulators, AOMs, are used to control this timing. The lidar uses a 2.5 cm effective diameter MEMs aperture to keep the lidar compact. It has 0.5 ns pulses, at a 1 MHz pulse rate, so it should have excellent range resolution. The operating temperature is 223 K, with a 30% QE, and a dark count of 1200 per second. They imaged a tower in Shanghai 12.8 km away, imaging with 100×128 pixels in a few minutes, using 9.3 photons per pixel, in an urban environment. Shorter range images are created quicker. They demonstrated 5 frames per second at a range of >1 km.
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Article Information
Compact long-range single-photon imager with dynamic imaging capability
Peng-Yu Jiang, Zheng-Ping Li, and Feihu Xu
Opt. Lett. 46(5) 1181-1184 (2021) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF