Detector and electronics R&D for picosecond resolution, single photon detection and imaging

The University of Leicester and Photek are pursuing a number of complementary detector development projects for multi-channel detection and imaging of single photon events with time resolution of the order of 25 ps. We describe the HiContent detector, an 8×8 multi-anode MCP detector with optical photocathode, which uses ASIC-based, multi-channel preamplifier/discriminator and time-to-digital convertor electronics, providing 64 channel parallel event detection. We present results from the initial detector calibration which indicate an RMS timing jitter of ≊ 75 ps with a sub-optimal experimental setup.