High-Precision And High Timing Stability Single-Photon Detection Based On Si-APD

The most critical technology is to accurately measure the arrival time of the laser pulse,for the application on high precision laser time transfer.It requires a singlephoton detector with extremely high precision and timing stability.At present,the precision and long-term timing stability requirements of the most advanced timefrequency transmission link has been reached to tens of picoseconds and subpicoseconds respectively,which poses an enormous challenge to the performance of single-photon detectors.This thesis focuses on the high-precision and high timing stability single-photon detection technology based on Si-APD to provide technical support for satellite-toground laser time transfer applications.The target parameters of the entire laser time transfer chain in this study is 30 ps root mean squire(RMS),0.1 ps@300s and 1 ps@1day timing stability expressed by time deviation TDEV.The main innovations of the thesis are as follows:1)For the long-term high-precision and high timing stability single-photon detection application,an avalanche detection circuit combining active quenching and gated Geiger-mode has been proposed.Furthermore,two versions of Si-APD based single-photon detectors with temperature drift compensation have been developed.The precision of the two detectors is both better than 20 ps RMS.These two developed single-photon detectors have been measured in a test system of laser time transfer.A precision of 25 ps RMS,TDEV of 0.1 ps@300s and 0.5 ps@1day have been obtained,corresponding to 2×10-17@1day frequency stability.These extremely high parameters would be useful for China space station project for high-precision satellite-to-ground laser time transfer applications.2)Aiming at the temperature drift effect in APD based single-photon detectors,two methods have been developed to minimize the delay drift.The passive temperature drift compensation method with a temperature drift coefficient of 7 fs/? is suitable for the applications while the ambient temperature changes slowly.The timing stability of the entire laser time transfer link could maintain 0.1 ps@300s TDEV,while the ambient temperature changes from 20 ? to 40 ?.The active temperature drift control method with a temperature drift coefficient of 10 fs/? could be used for the applications while the ambient temperature changes unpredictably.A stable time deviation as 0.15 ps@1000s of the entire laser time transfer chain could be realized while the ambient temperature fluctuated rapidly from 24? to 44?.These two temperature drift compensation schemes provide effective solutions for highprecision and high timing stability single-photon detection in outdoor applications with temperature variations.3)To overcome the limit of the short-term delay stability of single-photon detector,a multi-channel single-photon detection scheme has been developed,which optimizes the timing stability to 0.03 ps@300s of the entire laser time transfer chain,and the precision is 28 ps RMS.To our knowledge,this timing stability is the best performance ever reported for the laser time transfer application.It is worth mentioning that this multi-channel single-photon detection method neither introduces time walk effects nor increases the complexity of the data collection system,providing a new method for the high-precision laser time transmission system.