Gold Nanoparticle Surface Deposition Induced Quantum Efficiency Enhancement For Si-multi-pixel Photon Counters

Single-photon detection is one of the most ultrasensitive optical signal detection measures, which plays a more and more important role in laser ranging, quantum information, biophysics, laser imaging and ultrasensitive spectrum technology. And the detection efficiency is one of the most important features. Therefore, how to improve the detection efficiency of the Single-photon detectors is particularly important. Meanwhile, with recent development of nanotechnology, novel devices with nanostructures arise to improve the performance of photodetectors. This is because of the physical properties of the nanostructure materials.Here, we demonstrated that by surface decoration with gold nanoparticles on the active area, the quantum detection efficiency of a multi-pixel photon counter was increased due to surface plasmon resonance enhancement. The deposited gold nano-particles actually brought about almost the same enhancement factor for any photon-number fields. As a result, the photon-number-resolving capability of the multi-pixel photon counter was well reserved with the gold nano-particle deposition induced efficiency augment. This result provides guidance to the development of the high-efficiency photon-number-resolving detectors.