Single photon detector research at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology

This research starts by summarising the traditional way of developing a single-photon detector. Studying the behaviour of the avalanche photodiode while the reverse biasing voltage, temperature and the passive quenching resistor were changed resulted in a new approach to characterising avalanche photodiodes. The traditional use of a trans-impedance amplifier for the first stage was compared with a voltage amplifier. Changing the amplifier type results in a higher gain for the first stage. We tried calibrating a laser to produce single photons using neutral density filters. We used this attenuated laser light to see if our detector could detect single photons.