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Journal of Applied Physics

Elementary responses of analog photodetectors and absolute calibration of their efficiency

Daniil A. Safronenkov, Pavel A. Prudkovskii, A. V. Osipenkov, G. Kh. Kitaeva

Published May 8, 2025• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A modified Klyshko method for standardless calibration of analog photodetector efficiencies is suggested and experimentally implemented. The method is based on the measurement of the number of incident photons using correlation properties of biphotons generated under spontaneous parametric downconversion, and on the determination of the mean number of discrete elementary responses of a photodetector by deconvoluting the statistical distribution of the output photocurrents. As an example, the generalized efficiency of an analog photomultiplier is measured as the ratio of the average number of elementary current responses to the average number of incident photons. The statistical properties of the elementary responses of an analog photodetector depend not only on the detector itself, but also on the parameters of the subsequent electronic circuit. Nevertheless, it has been shown that the generalized efficiency determined by this way allows one to calibrate the photon fluxes by the analog photodetector without involvement of any reference sources or detectors.

DOI
10.1063/5.0260072

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A modified Klyshko method for standardless calibration of analog photodetector efficiencies is suggested and experimentally implemented. The method is based on the measurement of the number of incident photons using correlation properties of biphotons generated under spontaneous parametric downconversion, and on the determination of the mean number of discrete elementary responses of a photodetector by deconvoluting the statistical distribution of the output photocurrents. As an example, the generalized efficiency of an analog photomultiplier is measured as the ratio of the average number of elementary current responses to the average number of incident photons. The statistical properties of the elementary responses of an analog photodetector depend not only on the detector itself, but also on the parameters of the subsequent electronic circuit. Nevertheless, it has been shown that the generalized efficiency determined by this way allows one to calibrate the photon fluxes by the analog photodetector without involvement of any reference sources or detectors.
We extend the absolute quantum efficiency (QE) calibration method, previously used only for photon counters, to analog detectors with a high dispersion of single-photon responses. Our approach is demonstrated on a reference-free measurement of a photomultiplier tube (PMT) cathode QE with 4% relative uncertainty. It involves not only measuring the biphoton field correlation function, but also a special approximation of the distribution of detector readings in order to determine the average number of photoelectrons and the average charge corresponding to a single photoelectron. Results of the calibration were verified in an independent experiment; the numbers of incident photons detected by the PMT and a single-photon counter are in good agreement.
A new method of absolute calibration of photodetectors based on a nonclassical effect in nonlinear optics is discussed. The combined influence of a monochromatic flux of pump photons and quantum vacuum noise on a nonlinear crystal with no center of symmetry results in the appearance of rigorously correlated pairs of photons with continuous spectral distribution in the spontaneous parametric scattering of light (spontaneous parametric downconversion) process. The presence of an optical field in a broad spectral range created by the two-photon states (biphotons) makes it possible to develop a new method of measuring the spectral distribution of the absolute value of the quantum efficiency of photodetectors, both in photon counting and in analog regimes, that does not use any calibrated standard light sources (étalons). The feasibility of the method is demonstrated on different types of photomultiplier tube.
We realize and test in experiment a method recently proposed for measuring absolute quantum efficiency of analog photodetectors. Similar to the traditional (Klyshko) method of absolute calibration, the new one is based on the direct detection of two-mode squeezed vacuum at the output of a traveling wave OPA. However, in the new method, one measures the difference-photocurrent variance rather than the correlation function of photocurrents (number of coincidences), which makes the technique applicable for high-gain OPA. In this work we test the new method versus the traditional one for the case of photon-counting detectors where both techniques are valid.
Approaches to the standard-free calibration of the quantum efficiency of a wide class of analog detectors based on the measurement of statistical characteristics of fields generated by parametric down-conversion are analyzed. General expressions are obtained for the noise reduction factor of the difference photocurrent and for the covariance of photocurrents in the signal and idler channels that take into account the possibility of strong fluctuations in the amplitudes of single-photon response functions of the detectors used. It is shown that the measurement of the noise reduction factor of the difference photocurrent using detectors that cannot operate in the photon counting mode is on its own insufficient to directly characterize the level of two-mode squeezing in the down-conversion field and to determine the quantum efficiency of photosensitive elements without additional calibration procedures. A method to determine the quantum efficiency of such detectors based on measuring the dependence of the normalized covariance of photocurrents on the parametric gain is proposed.
The calibration of radiometric sensors is critical to ensure the accuracy of the remote sensing data and their usability.The current methods of the radiometric calibration are based on the establishment of high-precision primary standard and standard transfer chain,and the transfer chain is the main source of errors.The entangled photons-based theory creates a new technical way to realize the radiometric calibration of standardless transfer.The method of absolute calibration of photodetectors based on a nonclassical effect of the nonlinear optics in the photon-counting regime was discussed.The measurement was realized with the technique of entangled photons at 702 nm generated by a parametric down conversion process in a nonlinear crystal of BBO.The photomultiplier quantum-efficiency at the wavelength was measured during the experiment.It is estimated that the deviation is 0.1%.The technique is independent of any externally calibrated radiometric standards.