Ultra-Low-Noise Sinusoidally Gated Avalanche Photodiode for High-Speed Single-Photon Detection at Telecommunication Wavelengths

Authors report avalanche signal detection with an ultra-low-noise detector-circuit based on a sinusoidally gated avalanche photodiode (APD). An avalanche gain can be reduced to 10⁴, which results in strong suppression of afterpulsing. The gate repetition frequency reached 2 GHz, which is much higher than that of the other gated APDs. In addition, the detection efficiency of 10.5% was obtained at 1550 nm with a dark count probability of 6.1 × 10^-7 and an afterpulsing probability of 3.4%.