Effects of Clipped Photon Detection in the Triple Correlation Technique

Ronald J. Adrian

Benoı̂t Boulanger, Audrey Dot, Kamel Bencheikh +3 more

Vittorio Degiorgio

Manuel P. Cagigal, Pedro M. Prieto, L. Vega

We present two new techniques for estimating the autocorrelation function, based on the measurement of the mean number of clipped photocounts and on the calculation of the second-order factorial moment of a series of clipped data. The first procedure has the advantage of simplicity, although it produces a poor signal-to-noise ratio. On the other hand, the second technique gives a very good signal-to-noise ratio, when compared with other known methods.

Edward R. Pike

Ronald J. Adrian

The estimates of photoemission rate correlations that are obtained by clipped, e.g., one-bit, correlation techniques are in general distorted by the clipping, unless scaling techniques are used. It is shown that the Pois-son statistics of photoemission processes are such that the processes are inherently self-scaling when the range of signal fluctuations is contained in the range of inherent noise fluctuations. Self-scaling occurs, for example, when the total mean emission rate is large compared with the time varying signal rate. It permits clipped correlation to be used without distortion.