Highly sensitive detection for infrared photons by non-degenerate two-photon absorption under mid-infrared pumping

Abstract

We have demonstrated highly-sensitive photon counting in the infrared based on the two-photon absorption (2PA) in a silicon avalanche photodiode, where the required photon energy for inducing effective conductivity was provided by an intense mid-infrared (MIR) field at 3 $\mu$m. The used MIR pumping scheme could not only benefit from the enhanced 2PA coefficient in the non-degenerate regime, but also eliminate the detrimental background noises due to the pump harmonic excitation of the pump. Consequently, the enhancement factor for the signal counting rate unprecedented reached to about $10^5$ with input infrared pulses at the femtojoule level. Additionally, the noise equivalent power was substantially improved by two orders of magnitude comparing to conventional schemes with near-infrared pumping. Therefore, the presented configuration might provide an alternative to realize sensitive infrared detection and imaging with desirable features of room-temperature operation, no phase-matching requirement, and broadband responding window, which would find a variety of applications including remote ranging, sensitive sensing, biochemical imaging, and trace spectroscopy.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• High-speed 2D and 3D mid-IR imaging with an InGaAs camera
• Mid-infrared single-pixel imaging via two-photon optical encoding
• Single-Photon Infrared Imaging with a Silicon Camera Based on Long-Wavelength-Pumping Two-Photon Absorption
• Mid-infrared temporal ghost imaging via two-photon structured encoding
• Rapid chemically selective 3D imaging in the mid-infrared with a Si-based camera