Introduction to photodetectors part 1

Slawomir Piatek, Ph.D., Hamamatsu Corporation and New Jersey Institute of Technology
May 26, 2020

About this webinar

Photodetectors are essential components in a vast array of modern scientific and commercial instruments and devices; technological progress will make them even more ubiquitous. Understanding their opto-electronic properties, regimes of operation, circuit requirements, and noise characteristics is essential to a practitioner to make a proper photodetector selection for a given application.

 

Topics of presentation:

 

The purpose of this presentation is to provide guidance in this selection process by discussing the above considerations for the four most common point photodetectors:

  1. Photomultiplier tube
  2. Photodiode
  3. Avalanche photodiode
  4. Silicon photomultiplier

About the presenter

Slawomir S. Piatek has been measuring proper motions of nearby galaxies using images obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope as a senior university lecturer of physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has developed a photonics training program for engineers at Hamamatsu Corporation in New Jersey in the role of a science consultant. Also at Hamamatsu, he is involved in popularizing a SiPM as a novel photodetector by writing and lecturing about it, and by experimenting with the device. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in 1994.