When shot-noise-limited photodetectors disobey Poisson statistics

Jacob Rabinowitz, Mohsen Rezaei, Min Su Park, Chee Leong Tan, Melville Ulmer, Hooman Mohseni*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Photodetectors with internal gain are of great interest for imaging applications, since internal gain reduces the effective noise of readout electronics. High-gain photodetectors have been demonstrated, but only individually rather than as a full array in a camera. Consequently, there has been little investigation of the interaction between camera complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) electronics and the slow response time that high-gain photodetectors often exhibit. Here we show that this interaction filters shot noise and causes noise statistics to differ from the common Poisson distribution. As an example, we investigate a 320 × 256 array of InGaAs/InP high-gain phototransistors bonded to a CMOS readout chip. We demonstrate the filtering effects and discuss their consequences, including new (to the best of our knowledge) methods for extracting gain and increasing dynamic range.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3009-3012
Number of pages4
JournalOptics Letters
Volume45
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 1 2020

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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