No idea. But a single photon should require x amount of energy, two photon 2x and so on. Now if you have a good handle on the energy efficiency of your device you could put enough current and duration in there so the net comes to 1.5x. No idea if that works, just thinking out loud.
Photomultiplier tube, avalanche photodiode, or microchannel plate. The problem with all three is background "false positive" rate; the PMT is probably best. Cooled detectors can have very low background rates.
John
These are nice:
Osram makes very nice stuff. The 206K is really a beautiful part.
John
First generation image photon counting systems date back to the early
80's and used an image intensifier and a centroid measurement of the spot. They are still in use for certain type of astronomy. eg.Modern ones have lower noise, higher count rates, better linearity etc.
Similar methods are used to count individual ions in mass spectrometry.
Regards, Martin Brown
Yes, in theory. In fact, diode lasers are efficient enough that in certain circumstances you can make squeezed light by putting a sub-Poissonian bias current into the diode.
Squeezing means changing the quantum uncertainty distribution from circular, i.e. equal in sine and cosine phases and uncorrelated, to some other shape while still preserving the uncertainty product a la Heisenberg. In this case, you get more phase uncertainty and less intensity uncertainty.
That suggests that under some circumstances there is a measurable correlation between terminal voltage at the diode and photon emission. There are folks on sci.optics who would be able to give a better answer, though.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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