Development of an optical photon-counting imager with a monolithic Geiger APD array

Abstract

We have developed a sensor system based on an optical photon-counting imager with high timing resolution, aiming for highly time-variable astronomical phenomena. The detector is a monolithic Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode array customized in a Multi-Pixel Photon Counter with a response time on the order of nanoseconds. This paper evaluates the basic performance of the sensor and confirms the gain linearity, uniformity, and low dark count. We demonstrate the system's ability to detect the period of a flashing LED, using a data acquisition system developed to obtain the light curve with a time bin of 100 microseconds. The Crab pulsar was observed using a 35-cm telescope without cooling, and the equipment detected optical pulses with a period consistent with the data from the radio ephemeris. Although improvements to the system will be necessary for more reliability, the system has been proven to be a promising device for exploring the time-domain optical astronomy.

11 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in PASJ

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Optical photon-counting observation of the Crab pulsar with Kanata telescope using prototype IMONY
• Characterization of a high efficiency silicon photomultiplier for millisecond to sub-microsecond astrophysical transient searches
• Calibrating the photometric performance of a high-time-resolution photon-counting imager for optical astronomy
• Development of an imager with high time resolution optical photon counter
• One-week optical observations of pulsed emission from the Crab pulsar with IMONY on the 3.8 m Seimei telescope